Law Commons^™

Creative Commons And The New Intermediaries, Michael W. Carroll

Working Paper Series

This symposium contribution examines the disintermediating and reintermediating roles played by Creative Commons licenses on the Internet. Creative Commons licenses act as a disintermediating force because they enable end-to-end transactions in copyrighted works. The licenses have reintermediating force by enabling new services and new online communities to form around content licensed under a Creative Commons license. Intermediaries focused on the copyright dimension have begun to appear online as search engines, archives, libraries, publishers, community organizers, and educators. Moreover, the growth of machine-readable copyright licenses and the new intermediaries that they enable is part of a larger movement toward a Semantic …