There are important similarities between today's open source movement and the creative world of the pre-copyright era. These similarities have much to tell us about the effects of the modern copyright system, and about how open source methods are spreading to areas outside software. This talk will provide an introduction to the (surprising) origins of copyright, how copyright and centralized distribution gradually changed the nature of creativity, and how open source and decentralized distribution are changing it back again -- with some new twists. Time permitting, we'll also look at specific non-software business models based on unrestricted information flow and collaboration