Both corporate partners and musicians may have valid reasons for wanting to terminate a contract. Forcing them to uphold the contract curbs party agency. Relevant reasons may include the aim of avoiding undue investment in an artist who has proven to be commercially unviable, the wish to escape unfair situations in terms of rights transfer, or cases of (perceived) unfairness in terms of exploitation and/or remuneration. The excessive duration of a contract may in itself also give rise to problems. On a more general level, the exclusive nature of many music industry contracts sits uneasily with the vision of musicians as independent, creative actors. This chapter reviews how the selected substantive legal regimes affect parties’ possibility to terminate the contractual relationship. First, the chapter reviews potentially applicable limitations on contract duration, as well as grounds for termination on the basis of breach of contract. Taking a more practical view, the consequences of contract termination are then assessed in order to gauge whether these consequences may amount to switching costs that prevent the termination of contracts in practice.

In practice, there are several obstacles to the application of the substantive legal framework analysed in the previous chapters. First, there is a risk of contractual provisions that deviate from the legal norm. The qualification of certain rules as mandatory law may prevent such contractual deviation. Even so, effective recourse to the protective regimes throughout the course of the contract is not guaranteed. Reference may be made to the possibility for corporate partners to have recourse to trade secret protection and the apparent limited invocation of the protective legal framework. Collective enforcement may contribute to enhanced transparency throughout the music value chain and counter musicians’ fear of commercial retaliation. Further bolstering extra-judicial enforcement is likely to fulfil an important complementary role.

This chapter brings together the research findings and answers the main research question, namely how the legal framework can contribute to a achieving a fair(er) balance between the interests of musicians and their main corporate partners. It summarises the potential bottom-up initiatives, as well as the possible regulatory action identified throughout the book.

This chapter first analyses the rights and interests of the primary stakeholders in the music industry and introduces the various contracts entered into between musicians and their corporate partners. It then discusses the music value chain that results from such contracts in the streaming age. Two separate subsections are dedicated to, respectively, the division of revenues and the ongoing quest towards enhanced transparency. A concluding ‘bridge’ brings together the most relevant findings that lead into the analysis of the relevant legal framework in the subsequent chapters.

This chapter analyses limitations to parties’ freedom of contract as to the negotiation and formation stage of the contracts under review, that are aimed at remedying situations where musicians grant excessive rights to corporate partners. These limitations seek to ensure that such contracts have a ‘fair scope’. As yet, awaiting potential EU harmonisation of authorship and initial ownership, there are no relevant harmonising rules at the EU level. Instead, focus lies with restrictions under national law. First, objectionable precontractual behaviour may be sanctioned by precontractual liability, giving right to damages. Subsequently, the requirement of consent is subject to certain requirements. Third, the law limits parties’ freedom as to the scope of rights that may be transferred or licensed and provides tools to determine this scope in practice. Finally, the chapter turns to the negotiation and formation stage of secondary contractual relationships that may arise once the initial contract has been entered into. It concludes with an overview of the main findings.

This chapter describes the wider political and economic changes that enabled foreigners, and particularly the British, to increasingly access and engage with the existing world of collecting, education and the sciences on the subcontinent. The result would be a slowing of the growth of resources in Indian centers such as Seringapatam and an acceleration of the growth of individual European-owned collections. The chapter begins by exploring changes in the patterns of accumulation that accompanied the conquest of Bengal. Here, I focus on the early careers of several Company servants who would eventually bring significant collections to Britain: Robert Orme, Alexander Dalrymple and Charles Wilkins. Each of these individuals would play an important role in the establishment of Company science back in Britain. And each, in their modes and methods of acquiring collections of knowledge resources from Asia, illustrate the debt that the growth of British resources would owe, in this period, to two major factors: wartime conventions of looting and plundering, and (in consequence of the wartime upheaval) deepening social and political interaction between foreigners and local scholars and educators. While foreigners in India had always collected, both wartime plundering and the Company’s new position relative to the Mughal Empire would open up many new avenues of access for Britons intent on acquiring manuscripts, curiosities and other knowledge resources. But the large collections that were beginning to be brought back to London would remain, for now, part of the private trade, destined for personal collections or sale by individuals. The final section of this chapter follows the Company’s first steps toward moving from contracted-out to Company-owned science, which began with institutional changes on the subcontinent in the wake of the major land reforms in the 1790s.

This chapter investigates the political and economic dimension of the accumulation of knowledge resources at India House after the foundation of the library-museum. The chapter begins by describing how the Company came to play a more direct role in the acquisition and management of knowledge resources for repositories in Britain. Between the opening of the library and museum and the Great Exhibition of 1851, survey collecting for the Company, and private collecting by Company surveyors, was a primary means by which the Company’s new institutions of knowledge management were enriched. Following in the wake of military campaigns, Company surveys during this period became closely tied to both cultural plundering and biogeographical collecting. Embedded in a series of ongoing conflicts over territory and trade, the making of these collections served as a means of further weakening rival states. Once back in London, these collections also would be crucial to the early development of the Company’s library-museum. During the same period, Crown support for the old monopoly was beginning to wobble. The last section of this chapter considers the place of knowledge accumulation and management in the tumultuous period around the charter debate of 1813, when many of the Company’s monopoly privileges would be annulled. During these debates, a key defense of the monopoly was for the directors to present the administration at India House as the most trustworthy, authoritative source of knowledge regarding Asia in Britain, and thus the institution most suited to controlling trade and exercising governance. Within the Company, however, confidence in the Company’s grasp of knowledge about Asia was far less absolute, and after the Company’s losses in the 1813 charter, new worries about the Company’s knowledge management practices would lead to even further efforts to centralize and better organize the stores of information accumulating at India House.

This chapter follows the creation and early growth of Company science in London. The Company first began taking a direct stake in education and the sciences with the establishment of botanical gardens, medical training colleges and other institutions in British India. But around the turn of the century, the foundation of the new library-museum and colleges in Britain would sharply redirect the growth of new Company-run initiatives for science and education back to Britain. That shift toward a new, London-centered set of institutions and priorities related to knowledge management took full advantage of the Company’s legal monopoly on access to Asia’s knowledge resources. And it would begin with the stepwise incorporation into the administration at India House of the work of the orientalists, naturalists, collectors covered in the previous chapters. The London careers of a set of nabob-scholars – Robert Orme, Alexander Dalrymple and Charles Wilkins from Chapter 2, as well as William Marsden – illustrate how the early beginnings of Company science in London flourished at the porous boundary between individual and corporate ownership.

decades of Company rule, focusing on how a key issue of previous chapters – how contemporaries grappled with the question of just how Company science should serve national interests – was resolved, in part, by the rise of the “economic museum” movement and by new claims regarding the economic utility of the natural and human sciences. The first section considers new institutional developments in the connections between the India House library-museum and collections-based science institutions in the colonies. Increasingly, the India House library and museum would be represented as at the top of a hierarchy of respect to Company science establishments, reaching from London to the presidency governments and out into the rural divisions and settlements. The chapter then turns to the growing economic focus within the India House library-museum. The Company itself was no longer directly participating in trade, but it was responsible for the agricultural, industrial and other trade-related policies for British India, and the museum became closely tied to this. Some of the new responsibilities of the Reporter on the Products of India position were meant to aid the administrators in such areas of state. But the turn to a science of trade and industry was also, in part, the result of the directors more fully embracing the mission of making the library and museum useful for the (British) public by addressing industrialists, manufacturers and consumers in particular. Altogether, with a new, more clearly defined role as a mediator of industrial, educational and scientific relations between the home country and the colonies, these developments combined to bring new energy and purpose to the library and museum at India House. In almost exactly the same moment, however, the decisive undoing of the Company was brewing, brought on not by the free-trade liberals in Britain but by the resolute defiance of native soldiers in British India.

This chapter introduces the early modern East India Company and its modes of engaging with the sciences in the period before the mid eighteenth century. Two aspects of science and the early modern Company are emphasized. First, before 1757, the Company generally contracted out many of the navigational, historical, medical, mathematical and other areas of expertise that supported and were supported by overseas trade. As an institution, the Company did directly own and manage a vast amount of information related to logistics, regulations and accounting. However, although the Company also depended upon technical and scientific expertise, it did not directly fund, manage or organize the other branches of science upon which its operations depended. Thus, in this period, and following a general pattern of early modern “contractor states,” science generally grew and developed under the Company, if not at the Company. Second, science under the Company found space to grow by way of the peculiar structure and organization of Company trading that historians have called the “internal free trade.” The Company’s practice of allowing individuals to profit under the “private trade” would be especially important to the growth of the curiosity and manuscript trade between Britain and Asia in this period.