Abstract
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 Web. As that effort progresses, we should expect new kinds of intermediaries that rely on machine-readable law to emerge.
Disciplines
Computer Law | Intellectual Property Law
Date of this Version
August 2005
Recommended Citation
Carroll, Michael W., "Creative Commons and the New Intermediaries" (2005). Working Paper Series. 34.
https://digitalcommons.law.villanova.edu/wps/art34
Comments
Symposium piece. 2005 Mich. St. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2005).