Against the orthodoxy that copyright is an aesthetically neutral means of providing an incentive for the production of culture, this paper proposes that intellectual property regimes strongly shape the way culture is made. Three cases are examined. The first is rock music whose emergent Romantic mode of creativity in the 1960s was strongly reinforced by copyright law. The second, countervailing example is that of reggae music in Jamaica where, in the absence of effective copyright, a form of social authorship emerged, albeit a strongly entrepreneurial one. The open source software movement, with its explicit repudiation of copyright, provides the final case. Like reggae music it is socially authored. However reggae’s first-to-market business model and entrepreneurial culture actually make it a better guide to how cultural production might be organised in a market system, but without the economic and cultural costs that attach to copyright.