The Rules of the Game of Platform Cooperativism

Summary

Make the Rules or Your Rivals Will is the title of one of the most acclaimed books on competitive legal strategies, offering economic actors a clear choice: either play by your competitors’ rules or subject them to your own.[1] Needless to say, the second solution promises a better chance of success, especially in the early days of yet unexplored economic models. From Henry Ford’s victory over the Selden patent to the forty-year litigation faced by Thomas Edison and the complex strategies adopted by Bill Gates on standard licensing terms for software contracts and software copyright protection, an analysis of key economic sectors clearly shows that working under congenial rules from the outset of an economic model is the most crucial ingredient for success.

This assumption may seem quite obvious. After all, legal regulations create markets, define their boundaries and influence choices and behaviour. However, the weight of competitive legal strategies is often underrated, perhaps due to a natural aversion to litigation and lawyers, or because we tend to believe that the “state should not be picking the winner” but instead create a “level playing field” that puts the competitors on equal terms.