Carroll, Michael W.,Creative Commons and the New Intermediaries. Michigan State Law Review, Vol. 45, 2006; Villanova Law/Public Policy Research Paper No. 2005-13.

        Carroll argues that Creative Commons licenses play both disintermediating and intermediating roles on the Web. He first points out that there is currently a proliferation of them on the web, a development that was quickly followed by search engines designed to look for works with CC licenses. In this way, they have become disintermediaries by enabling end-to-end transactions and become reintermediatiares by allowing new services to be preformed and new online communities to form.

       Carroll explains how CC licenses work, stating that "as of this writing, there are 16,000,000 digital objects accessible over the internet linked to CC licenses". Creative Commons not only acts as an intermediary, but enables other intermediaries as well. These include search engines, archives and libraries, producers and publishers ("which facilitates amateur-to-amateur communication"), and CC communities, offering examples of each and how they function. Under CC communities, he describes places that are dedicated to music, visual art, photographs, blogs, and education. This revolution in copyright has helped to spur Berner's-Lee and his colleagues to create a new Semantic Web, which will offer a higher degree of interoperability.           

        What is most important to the discussion of Creative Commons and online communities in Carroll's article is the vast list of examples he provides. This is an amazing list of the different ways that CC has facilitated different models of online communities. He cites Flickr for photography, which is the largest site for both commercial and noncommercial uses of photographs licenses under CC. It's only one model though and there are many, many more. CC has facilitated new business models as well, which Flickr is not. Magantune is a music site that has created a business in which users can listen to the works for free and then download CC licenses music at the price of their choosing. CC has, as Carroll shows, made a large impact on internet community's, and been used in different models, some nonprofit, some for profit, all based on the communities needs.