Policy in Print

Policy briefs, background papers and site visit reports provide support for face-to-face meetings of Congressional and agency staff, arts industry leaders, scholars, and cultural policy experts.

Cultural Diplomacy

Interest in public and cultural diplomacy, after a long post-Cold War decline, has surged in the last few years. The concept of cultural diplomacy – defined most broadly as the propagation of American culture and ideals around the world – has traditionally been defined by government-sponsored broadcasting, educational exchanges, cultural programming, and information or knowledge flow. A 21st century view of cultural diplomacy is broadly defined and considers all the ways that images and symbols of U.S. culture and ideals are transmitted abroad. Read full texts:

America’s Image Abroad: The UNESCO Cultural Diversity Convention and U.S. Motion Picture Exports

Cultural Diplomacy and the National Interest: In Search of a 21st Century Perspective

Media Policy and Intellectual Property

Curb Center white papers provide insight into debate and discussion around Radio Deregulation and Consolidation and Reconsidering the Performance Right.

Laws and regulation around intellectual property and media consolidation are one of the most important cultural policy issues of the 21st century.  Topics of interest range broadly—from assessing piracy in developing countries to file sharing on college campuses; the viability of record labels to the market opportunities for mobile technology; the remuneration of songwriters to the success of blockbuster film studios; smashups to Youtube; Flickr to Facebook; royalties on Beatles songs to accessing our country’s most iconic photographs.

Read full texts:

Radio Deregulation and Consolidation: What is in the Public Interest?

From the beginning, radio regulation has utilized the language of social policy to describe a set of public interest outcomes. However, while remaining faithful to the language of social benefit, regulators have increasingly employed the economic strategy of deregulation to achieve long-stated policy goals. Today, a few major companies dominate America’s national and local radio markets. Is this good for business? Is this in the public interest?

The Music Industry in Flux: Reconsidering the Performance Right

After years of relatively peaceful coexistence, the careful balance among the various stakeholders was upset in the 1990s with the large-scale convergence of personal computing, digital music, and the Internet. Recording artists and record companies in particular viewed digital audio transmissions (both legal transmissions and pirated downloads) as free substitutes for traditional record sales—which threatened their livelihood. Songwriters and music publishers, however, were less concerned; they felt reasonably assured that they would be fairly compensated in the new digital environment. Why? The difference in the two reactions goes to the heart of U.S. copyright law and the concept of the performance right.