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Tech Giants Bankrolling IP Hoarding Start-Up
theodp writes "Microsoft alum Nathan Myhrvold so strongly believes intellectual property is the next software that he's studying for the patent bar exam. His company, Intellectual Ventures, doesn't actually make anything - only patent attorneys roam the hallways. Myhrvold isn't the only true believer. Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia, Apple, Google, and eBay have contributed to a $350M bankroll which the firm is using to buy up existing patents that can be rented to companies who want to produce real products."
I've though about doing this, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who came up with the idea. Dammit, should've patented it when I had the chance.
Let's see how all of this will play out for linux... Good or bad?
Intellectual property is the biggest export of the US. People say we import everything and export nothing, but that's not true. It makes sense there would be an industry built around the largest export.
How much more broken does our system have to get before it becomes completely disfunctional.
The way I see it, These guys will basically crank random noise into the patent system until virtually every idea that trys to come into production will have a lien of some kind on it. Thereby blocking any kind of developement by the small guy, only the mega corps will be able to produce new ideas and they will keep the pace as slow as possible to maximize there profit returns on current technology. In short THIS Bites.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
What about the "don't be evil" google motto? more like Don't be evil, unless it gives you a s***load of money
...if we truly are in "The Information Age". These sentences in the article sum it up:
"Patent owners get money upfront for the dusty ideas sitting on their shelves, the investors get the rights to use the ideas without being sued and Myhrvold gets to rent those same ideas to other companies that need them to continue creating products. Intellectual-property experts say his plan is audacious and unprecedented, customized for a new, rapidly dawning business environment."
It certainly seems like a Win-Win... of course, until the first lawsuits start flying. But we'll just have to see how this shakes out. In the meantime, it makes sense to parlay information as a product in "The Information Age", and that's what's being done here.
Find out about the Lexus Rx400h Hybrid!
Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
This is an unfortunate turn of events, and I believe one of the biggest threats to the open source movement. Some of the patents are so oddball or general that anyone can use them to hammer away at some underfunded Sourceforge group to keep them from developing anything that can be used as a competitive product.
The small software houses can't afford to hire patent specialists, and the big behemoths will steal the ideas out from under the little guys. I wonder how well the patents will hold up in other software-rich countries, like India, Russia, Croatia and Serbia.
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
- Doctor Who
QUICK KIDS!!! Go change your CS major to a law degree!!!!! It's the wave of the future!!!!
I sure as hell hope litigation and royalty fees aren't going to be the "new" new economy.
As a side note, with how many "patents" Amazon has, I'm pretty surprised they aren't on board with this.
sigh...
Microsoft, Intel, Sony, Nokia, Apple, Google, and eBay
Apple zealots and google bashers please enter stage left.
The purpose of intellectual property law is promote innovation and investment in our societies. This 'rent-seeking' approach by major companies shows we need some serious reform in this area of law. We need to get back to basics -
Copyright is to reward authors NOT publishers and distributors.
Trademarks are to help consumers identify choice b/w products NOT assist virtual monopolies stifle competition.
Patents are to promote innovation and reward inventors NOT allow lazy rich companies to 'rent-seek' from others.
People need to remember that IP law ultimately exists to help the public. If it is not doing that it is seriously flawed.
"Tech Giants Bankrolling IP Whoring Start-Up"
It's all about the status quo. Back in the old days of personal computing companies competed on quality and price (and not necessarily at the same time). But now that we have huge companies such as Microsoft, they want to defend their positions by making it nearly impossible for any new company to gain any ground.
This isn't really new. When was the last time you saw a new automobile manufacturer in the US? It's not because it's hard to make cars. There are tons of places to outsource production. The thing which makes it nearly impossible is selling them. In the US it's illegal in almost most states to sell automobiles without going through dealerships. In other words, it's illegal to sell new cars and trucks directly to consumers.
Because any new automobile manufacturer would be locked out of the current dealerships, he'd either be out of luck or would have to build thousands of dealership across the country. A daunting task for sure.
Now the same type of behavior is taking place in computers. It shouldn't be surprising at all. The downsides of course will be no real innovation and rising prices. But you probably knew that already.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
The sad thing is, this has always been the biggest danger with patents, but the people who could make a difference were too busy worrying about the big-guy-licensing-out-little-guy problem (or making their own money, depending) to notice.
Patents should work like trademarks: if you aren't actually using the invention and don't have any plans to do so within a reasonable timeframe, you automatically lose the patent rights and anyone can use the knowledge your patent documentation provides. (It would be better if you had to demonstrate a use or intended use before a patent application was approved, but that's obviously unrealistic right now.)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Do you consider yourself a capitalist? Do you respect your politicians and trust them to uphold the economic system that made us great? Bad news. Your politicians are failing you, they are using government control to hurt innovation, progress, and competition. Your elected politicians do not believe in the free market, they don't believe in capitalism, and they certainly don't value innovation.
Take as another example the music/video industries . They are being kept alive by the government, not by the market. In a free market economy, we would let them collapse without shedding a tear.
Software is machinery built in logic which can perform useful tasks, manage information, save lives, entertain, facilitate communication...
In contrast, unrestricted patents have no intrinsic usefulness, rather than the imposition of an artificial scarcity.
Unlimited-scope patents (eg patents on software concepts) could be useful if they actually facilitated innovation.
I can actually see how a non-technical lawmaker could imagine a developer tackling some design/coding issues, entering a few search words into a patent company website, and getting pages of concepts which this developer then uses to write a better program, or finish the task in less time.
However, I could see the Republican Party converting en masse to Islam before this happens.
This sweeping regime of unrestricted, increasingly fine-grained patents amounts to an historically unprecedented privatisation of the Astral Plane (which I define here as the space of all possible realities, imaginings, concepts, ideas).
Up till now, the Astral Plane has been traditionally honoured as a Public Common, except where expressed into the physical plane in concrete tangible form (eg specific text, music, machinery etc).
If my own (small) country makes any moves to legislate this Astral Plane land-grab, I'll do everything I can - even agitating for national strikes etc - to stop it.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
We can't do it because someone already patented the Clue Hammer(TM), the Clue-by-Four(TM) and the Clue ICBM(TM)
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.
IBM is the leads in new patents every year. Their IP release form they make you sign as an employee is pretty lengthy. But IBM rarely let's their patents go because of which IBM's success is partly due from those thousands of IP patent's they attain every year. IBM already has one of the largest patent portfolios worldwide and it continues to register more patents with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in one year...3,415 patents in 2003 more than any other company ever has. It was the eleventh consecutive year that IBM was awarded the most patents, and it brought IBM's total over those 11 years to more than 25,000 U.S. patents. I don't think they'll be treading on Big Blue's turf for a while.
"Intellectual Ventures"... it's almost an unsettling idea to think a company like that is out there. It's an interesting idea, but I have to say I don't like it. It reminds me of the people buying up 50,000 domain names incase someone might want to use one in the future and then just sitting on them like a jerk. What a pain in the ass it would be to come up with some new idea in the future only to have to match it against a company who is sitting on 500,000 "patents" on as many broad topics as possible just to make sure the idea was never thought of before in any way shape or form. It kind of defeats the purpose of patenting if you ask me.
It's a pain enough as it is trying to find a nice domain name these days. At least when you find one you know it's yours & you can own it with certainty.
If all these "patent hoarding" companies are going to be out there claiming any broad idea that might ever be useful you won't even be able to tell if your idea's already patented or not. It won't be a simple/instant check on register.com, it will be a "Egh... well, let's start up the business, make a few million, and then hope we don't get our !@# pounded 5 years from now from 4 patent-hoarding companies claiming to have already thought of something kind of similar. What a mess.
Companies like this will destroy the free enterprise we Americans enjoy. If these companies are not stopped, every startup company will be paying royalties to these patent pirates, which will keep the big companies in control (maybe that's the motive).
There are a few problems of course. Certain companies in the US and EU will kick up a stink and political/economic pressure will no doubt be bought and applied. So it will need to be a fairly wealthy and largely self sufficient country, or have some other bargaining chip. Laws might get passed banning "gray imports", but that's not a problem for the seller if they have a disclaimer stating that it is up to the buyer to check import regulations before ordering and they do not accept liability for goods seized by customs. It's even easier if the product is a software program of course, there are already plenty of websites offering software for download upon recipit of credit card details, both legit and otherwise.
This whole "patent company" idea looks more like a great way for a country to hand over more control to lawyers and its industry overseas to me. And how will the overpaid lawyers get their nice shiny cars, watches and other luxury goods when their own laws prevent them from importing them?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Not at all. You can sue someone for patent infringement even if they developed the infringing code independantly. To label a patent infringer "scum" or a "sponger" when they could be perfectly innocent is going way too far.
Seventeen years is an incredibly long time in the world of IT. That means that patents from as far back as 1988 (when people were just getting excited about the new 386) are still valid now in the US.
So one day your African start-up is merrily going along infringing one or two of Megacorp's patents, and then suddenly Megacorp's "security force" shows up and kills all the workers, burns down the factory, and confiscates the "pirated" material.
Megacorp: 2000384348783 Enterpreneurs: 0
Taiwain is already an IP haven to a certain extent - because China has been so sccessful at bribing/threatening other nations on Taiwan's status, they haven't signed up to some of the more insane aspects of international treaties such as WIPO. Because the US is a big supporter, they don't suffer much for it.
Actually, I think nonsense like this hearkens back to a story about tulip bulbs and unsustainable markets.
The end is coming for the corporate kings, and it's nonsense like this that will expedite their demise.
Go, Bill, Go...
Having somebody floating around whose only real motivation is ferreting out such scum and getting them to pay for the hard work that they're trying to sponge off of is a good thing.
Have you ever written any substantial piece of code? Chances are that you are infringing dozens of patents. Are you "scum" or a "sponger" because of it? I don't think so, since I doubt you even know of the existence of the patents you are infringing.
Many ideas that are being patented are so obvious that many people have them independently. The one who happens to be first to the patent office wins.
The real scum are the people who patent things that they know full well (or should know) are part of the public domain: ideas that others have talked about, ideas that have been discussed, ideas that are in textbooks. They steal from the public ideas and property to the tune of billions of dollars.
Apple lost (this was the one lawsuit many of us were hoping would sink Microsoft once and for all) because their UI elements were not 'patented'. They learnt well from this lesson and have since been patenting every widget under the sun.
I fully expect Google know their history well, and also know that Microsoft is sniffing around their territory. They would be fools to think that Microsoft would treat them any differently to Apple, and are probably thinking how to protect themselves as best they can.
I'm sick of people claiming this is capitalism, it's mercantilism, there is a difference. Don't assume that anything done by our current government necessarily makes it capitalist.
Damn.
It's like a dream. I remember posting this more or less same comment in a PC Magazine online forum back in '98 or '99.
This is the endgame, folks. This is what Gates has had planned for years -- the real endgame. Not some iffy market monopoly over PC operatings systems and office software.
This is the whole enchilada. They want to own EVERYTHING worth owning. This is why the "Intellectual Property" meme has been pumped so hard these past few years. the real reason why the RIAA, MPAA, the SPA, and all the overseas equivalents are suing anything that moves. It's the natural outcome of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
The biggest boys are pooling their resources to start the ultimate monopoly. They want to put a meter on every conceivable human idea they can beg, buy, borrow or steal. I'm not overstating how enormous their ambition is. Don't look at the distracting smiling face; keep your eyes on the magicians' hands.
I DO understand that they are talking about patents. But it's really irrelevant. They are going to force revenue to precipitate out of the ether into their hands that dwarfs anything Gates ever dreamed of. And that kind of wealth, driven by monoploy players, will be used to buy up more than merely patents.
It's why MS has been pumping the RIAA and MPAA to adopt MS proprietary codecs. It's why the X-Box REALLY exists. It's about owning the culture, or more precisely, the circulatory system of the culture. They want to own processes, patents, and eventually, every piece of ownable video, audio, and images of art. They will own the newspapers, or at least the means of disseminating the newspapers. All cable networks. They want the internet(s) under their control, if only to control the information flow so it can't affect their power.
The biggest boys are lining up for a piece of something even they can't visualize. The ultimate shape of this monster will be worldwide. It's power will be greater than any government or combination of governments.
They won't permit any real change in patent or copyright laws. They might let us have token victories on things that don't matter much, but the final shape will be dictated by them.
Here's the final outcome:
A loose confederation of very wealthy men will run a structure composed of corporations that will really, truly own every copyrighted work of man. They will own our history. They will meter it out to their advantage. Witness (NBC?) refusing to permit use of a copyrighted video of Bush making an idiot of himself on TV before the election, just because they could, no reason necessary.
And these corporations will hold copyrights and perhaps even patents, in some form, for ever-extended periods of time. Effectively for eternity. Corporations can't die. They can't go to jail. You can't arrest them. They are fictions designed to hide real men from real responsibilty for their actions.
We're going to have immortal fictions own our world. Americans say, "So what? I'll buy stock."
That's why privately owned corporations are all the rage right now. Why some of the biggest are invite-only for those they deem worthy. ICANN was bought by one of these monstrosities. Some corporations are buying back their own stock with an eye to, well, not share the wealth.
I'm only pointing out the obvious.
I'm not anti-business. I'm anti-corporation. There is a difference. I want expiration dates on IP. I want the corporate shield for individual malfeasance to be gone. I want this incestuous network of greedy buggers to hew to some kind of law that they didn't write themselves. We fought long and hard to break up the 19th century trusts that were smothering the life out of representative government; I DON'T want them back, only immortal, anational, and unkillable.
However, the USPTO has a vested interest in encouraging as many patents as possible, since more patent applications == more income, and a bigger patent office is a bigger kingdom for the people in charge. Plus, it's just plain easier to rubber-stamp the stuff coming in without checking it thoroughly. That's why we see the exact opposite of the approach I described above.
Basically, if a law is really bad, the local police often don't bother enforcing it. They've got better things to do. The USPTO doesn't have anything better to do, and it enforces the bad laws that it oversees with great enthusiasm.
As quoted in Lessig's OSCON speech (kudos to whoever made that Flash presentation), Bill Gates has been thinking along these lines for a while:
Can't find examples of evolution? No matter, neither could Dawkins
You know, during the 1800's there were those who believed that the entire purpose of the industrial revolution was to leverage inventions like the cottin gin to expand their plantations for unlimited groth and profit. However, what the industrial revolution really demanded was a mobile and educated workforce - the anti thesis of the plantation system. At first they made laws so harsh you couldn't even teach a black person to read and extended slavery to forever, then they tried to regulate all the industries in the north and force them to respect slave ownership rules in the south, and when that failed they tried to break themselves off from the union and fence themselves off from the rest of the world causing all hell to break loose.
Well today, there are those who believe that the entire purpose and meaning of the information age is leverage their IP holdings to the four courners of the earth for unlimited growth and profit. But what the information age really demands is the uninhibited and unrestricted flow of information. At first they passed harsher laws until a person who coppies a CD can get worse penalities than a violent murderer, then they extended the terms of copyrights to effectively forever, then they tried to fence themselves off from the rest of the world using Digital Rights Managment technology. Well all hell is about to break loose.
There is a _very_ simple fix to this issue. To aquire a patent, you must have working prototype. While I don't agree with software patents, this can still be applied. It would prevent people from just thinking of crap and getting a patent. There is not cost or R&D in thinking of something. The real purpose of a patent it to protect the investment of all the R&D by people. To just look at the market and try to guess things that may come up in the next 5-10 years is not innovative or deserving of a patent. If a patent would just require the submission of a complete working prototype, most of the problems of the patent system could go away (not all, but the biggest ones).
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Inventor gets paid for selling his patent for X to Microsoft. Now whether X is a patent for an artificial brain or a triple-click on a mouse has nothing to do with the fact that MS now has one more patent in their arsenal. What is another choice? Ban people from assigning their patents? How then will the people that file them make money and what is their incentive to file the patent, thus disclosing it to the world? There isn't one and they'd be better off using it as a trade secret. Or, as the argument goes, if companies did not have clauses in their employment contracts stating that everything done on company time was property of the company (i.e., an agreement to assign all IP rights), then the inventors would walk out the door with millions of dollars in R&D to go to the competitor. Please propose a better solution given the real focus of the article.
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
The problem is that we have a bunch of bad patents in the wild. Unfortunately, any issued patent is presumed valid by the courts unless overwhelming evidence is gathered against it at great expense.
The problem here is that the worse an issued patent is (overbroad, obvious, not novel, submarined), the more valuable it is to a pure patent aggregator. This is because bad patents are more likely to cover things that have become common practice, so they empower the holder with vast powers over entire industries. IP-only companies are going to be natural magnets for bad patents, because they care only about getting the maximum bang for the buck. There are no other considerations like actually trying to produce useful products.
The USPTO is primarily paid to examine patents, not issue them or except maintenance fees. The USPTO receives roughly 350,000 applications per year (7000 per week) and issues about 1000-1500 per week.
it could probably reduce the number of granted patents by a factor of 10 just by interpreting the letter of the law
Interpreting law is what judges do. Most people seem to like it that way. I suppose police you suggest that police officers interpret the law as well? It's never been their job before, but I bet they could realize lots of "results".
never giving the applicant the benefit of the doubt
And this is how patents have been examined for over one hundred years. Good idea, unfortunately it's not new.
doing exhaustive prior art searches
Can you define prior art? I am talking about the legal definition. Have you ever debated prior art with an attorney? Have you ever signed your name and submitted papers to a federal court where your entire argument depends on a date you found on a website? Do think that's a fun or easy thing to do?
and generally making it a royal pain in the ass to get any patent.
The USPTO receives more than 7000 applications per week and issues about 1250 per week. It has also expanded to address the growing backlog and break even (the backlog is no longer increasing in almost every department.) I'm curious where you establish "royal pain in the ass", since more than 80% of patent applications are abandoned in the current system.
However, the USPTO has a vested interest in encouraging as many patents as possible, since more patent applications == more income, and a bigger patent office is a bigger kingdom for the people in charge. Plus, it's just plain easier to rubber-stamp the stuff coming in without checking it thoroughly. That's why we see the exact opposite of the approach I described above.
I guess you're just being funny now. If there were the slightest shred of truth to your hyperbole, then why does the USPTO issue about 1250 patents per week but we read about maybe 1 or 5 per month at most? Why do people always fall back on the "swinging sideways on a swing" or the "one click purchase" patents? If reality and facts were on your side, then wouldn't we be reading about hundreds or thousands of "rubber stamped" patents per month? Per year?
Of course, it's not really your fault. You probably aren't aware that when a patent ends up on the front page, the examiner's entire career is in jeopardy. You probably aren't aware that the examining process takes 12-48 months and involves 10-200 pages of correspondence between the attorneys and the examiners. You probably aren't aware that having a high issue percentage is taboo among examiners and definitely not something to talk about. Finally, you probably aren't aware that 35 U.S.C. 102 states "a person shall be entitled to a patent unless..." which means that ultimately, the attorney can push the application to a board of appeals, in which case the decision to issue is largely out of the examiner's hands yet the examiner's name is still on the issued patent.
Basically, if a law is really bad, the local police often don't bother enforcing it. They've got better things to do.
What, like prohibition? I guess you never heard of the war on drugs? I guess you haven't seen police officers enforcing segregation? You have a seriously deficient understanding of the difference between interpreting law and executing law. If you combine those powers, you have bad results. They are kept separate for very important reasons.
The USPTO doesn't have anything better to do, and it enforces the bad laws that it oversees with great enthusiasm.
Once again, the USPTO doesn't "oversee" anything. Interpretation of the law is done by judges. The USPTO issues a patent if it fails to enforce the application - "a per
What about the "don't be evil" google motto?
As a short definition of "evil," I submit that "evil" is the "willingness to fuck over other people for your own profit." That provides a quick-and-dirty litmus test for evilness.
The current marketplace encourages evil. Google is a prime example-- they make a big deal about how they don't want to do evil, but then they invest in a company which is designed from the git-go to perform evil.
The reason is simple: if they don't, they will be in a world of pain when everyone else starts using trivial patents as weapons of restraint. (99.999% of all patents are trivial, IMNSHO).
So, either they do evil now and protect themselves, adding to the decay of honest business; or, they take the moral high road, and risk death by a thousand lawsuits.
In an area where thugs rule the streets, only thugs may walk the streets free of worry. Our current system is ruled by thugs. Google is just arming themselves like the rest of the miscreants; but by doing so, they are joining them.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Yes, and there wouldn't be so many patents to examine if people didn't think that they had a good chance of getting them issued. The more that get issued, the more that get examined. Are you sure that you're not including applications that get re-examined? In my experience (I have well over a dozen patents, courtesy of my former employers), most applications ultimately get approved.
Have you ever debated prior art with an attorney?
Yes. I've been pulled into patent lawsuits.
Have you ever signed your name and submitted papers to a federal court where your entire argument depends on a date you found on a website? Do think that's a fun or easy thing to do?
Who the hell cares if it's fun or easy? If the patent examiner sees evidence that there's prior art on of a website, then its his civic duty to investigate further before yanking a chunk of knowledge out of the public domain for 20 years.
. If there were the slightest shred of truth to your hyperbole, then why does the USPTO issue about 1250 patents per week but we read about maybe 1 or 5 per month at most? Why do people always fall back on the "swinging sideways on a swing" or the "one click purchase" patents? If reality and facts were on your side, then wouldn't we be reading about hundreds or thousands of "rubber stamped" patents per month? Per year?
Because a vast numbers of bogus patents are issued but haven't yet been "discovered" by the appropriate leeches. That's one of the things that this VC new venture is going to be involved in. It doesn't matter if 95% of the patents are reasonable. One bad patent can cause orders of magnitude more economic damage to an industry than the economic worth of a typical good patent.
Of course, it's not really your fault. You probably aren't aware that when a patent ends up on the front page, the examiner's entire career is in jeopardy.
Sure, there's always going to be a couple of low-level scapegoats per year to cover the collective asses of the whole system.
You probably aren't aware that the examining process takes 12-48 months and involves 10-200 pages of correspondence between the attorneys and the examiners.
Sure I am. I've been through the process many times. All it takes is ca$h, a good attorney and some technical jargon. My employers have patented some of my brilliant ideas, and some of my less-than mediocre ideas, depending mainly on how many patents they wanted to get that year. I've never noticed any correlation between the quality of the idea and the difficulty of obtaining a patent. (BTW, have you ever noticed that one of the main jobs of an attorney is to simply reformat technical documentation into double-spaced courier font for $200/hr, changing every 's' ending on a plural noun to the phrase "a plurality of". How can you read that monospaced crap all day?)
the attorney can push the application to a board of appeals, in which case the decision to issue is largely out of the examiner's hands yet the examiner's name is still on the issued patent.
The board of appeals is an integral part of the overall flawed system.
What, like prohibition? I guess you never heard of the war on drugs?
That would be mainly pushed by the feds headquartered in the same city as the USPTO.
I guess you haven't seen police officers enforcing segregation?
I'm not aware of any current laws requiring segregation. Back when police did enforce it, they were part of the problem, when instead they should have been protesting and resisting the laws instead of saying "I'm just doing my job here".
The USPTO does not have authority to "reject" an application (in the sense that the USPTO says "no" and the case is final) - it can only attempt to convince the attorneys that an appeal would be a waste of time, then the applicant abandons.
Any
I don't think there is any way they can fail with this. They'll just buy so many patents that they can sue anyone except another patent house (who they will NEVER sue directly) into oblivion using a shotgun method. Citing several infringements in a single case also ensures that even if one patent is invalidated, they still recover the investment in litigation. Besides, when the company is composed almost entirely of lawyers, legal costs aren't nearly as high as they would be if the lawyers had to be hired seperately.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
I'll see your Wikipedia, and raise you a Merriam-Webster:
/-list/ noun or adjective /"m&r-k&n-"tE-'lis-tik, -"tI-, -t&-/ adjective
One entry found for mercantilism.
Main Entry: mercantilism
Pronunciation: -"tE-"li-z&m, -"tI-, -t&-
Function: noun
1 : the theory or practice of mercantile pursuits : COMMERCIALISM
2 : an economic system developing during the decay of feudalism to unify and increase the power and especially the monetary wealth of a nation by a strict governmental regulation of the entire national economy usually through policies designed to secure an accumulation of bullion, a favorable balance of trade, the development of agriculture and manufactures, and the establishment of foreign trading monopolies
- mercantilist
- mercantilistic
I am John Hurt.