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Economic models of the traditional and well-known sense usually describe either manufactured physical goods or services performed, both of which are scarce resources: only so much grain can be grown, for instance—or widgets churned out of an industrial plant, or pipes plumbed by professionals. Short of espionage, even the market for Information was tied to the cost of materials and availability of produced goods such as printed books, pressed records, or spooled movies. In other words, though the Information was created once and itself remained unchanged, the marginal cost of creating copies of that Information was the sum of the materials, labor, and transportation costs used the produce, package, and ship the finished physical good to a store or warehouse.
