Definition
The surreptitious printing of another bookseller's or publisher's copy of a work, without authorization, for the purpose of financial gain. Comprint refers to the unauthorized reproduction of a protected text — an early precursor to what modern law addresses under copyright infringement. The act was condemned at common law and prohibited by statute in England. The term derives from the idea of printing "together with" or alongside another's legitimately held copy right, meaning the printer piggybacks on the original publisher's labor and investment without license.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "To print together" or "to reprint without permission a work belonging to another."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "To print together. To print surreptitiously a work belonging to another."
The gap between common and legal usage here is narrow but meaningful. Where the general language captures the mechanical act of unauthorized reprinting, the legal term carries a specific commercial element — the intent to make gain — and historically attached to a defined relationship between booksellers operating within the English trade. The legal wrong was not mere copying but the deliberate appropriation of another's commercial position in the book trade.
Common Confusion
Comprint should not be confused with modern copyright infringement, though it is its historical ancestor. Copyright infringement under contemporary statute is a broad, rights-based framework covering reproduction, distribution, adaptation, and public performance across all media. Comprint was a narrower, trade-specific wrong, rooted in common law and guild-era publishing norms, that applied primarily to booksellers and printers in the physical reproduction of books. Researchers conflating the two risk misreading historical materials that predate the statutory copyright regime as if they reflect modern doctrine — they do not.
Why It Matters in Research
Comprint is a term encountered almost exclusively in historical legal sources. It belongs to the era of the English Stationers' Company and the pre-Statute of Anne publishing order, when copy rights were trade monopolies held by members of the book trade rather than authors. Researchers working in early English legal history, the history of intellectual property, or press regulation will encounter this term in sources from roughly the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.
Several research traps apply. First, later dictionaries (including both editions of Black's) reproduce the definition nearly verbatim without development, which can create a false impression that the term had consistent legal application across time. In fact, its practical significance diminished rapidly after the Statute of Anne (1710), which shifted the framework toward statutory copyright. Second, the term appears in English sources with essentially no counterpart in American colonial or early federal law — American researchers should treat it as an English law term with limited direct relevance to domestic U.S. legal history. Third, Burrill's entry connects comprint to compurgation in the same passage, a product of alphabetical proximity rather than substantive relationship; researchers should not infer a doctrinal connection between the two.
The most productive corpus connections run toward entries on copyright, literary property, the Stationers' Company, and the Statute of Anne. Researchers interested in the transition from common law copy rights to statutory protection will find comprint a useful index term for locating primary materials in that transition period.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in close agreement on substance but vary instructively in their framing. Black's (both editions) and Rapalje & Lawrence define comprint purely in terms of its wrongfulness — a surreptitious act contrary to common law — citing Wharton without further elaboration. This treats the term as a settled legal wrong with no need for historical situating.
Bouvier adds the literal derivation ("strictly, it signifies to print together") and gestures toward a statutory backdrop ("there are several statutes in prevention of this act"), though he does not name them. This is a more historically honest framing: the common law prohibition existed alongside overlapping statutory protections, including the Licensing Acts and later the Statute of Anne. Jacob's Law Dictionary and Cowell's Interpreter, cited by Bouvier, are the older English sources where this term appears most fully developed.
Burrill is the most expansive and situates comprint within "old English law" and "old European law," signaling that even by his time the term was understood as archaic. His entry also captures the essential mechanics — one bookseller printing another's copy — more precisely than the others.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is any account of enforcement, remedy, or the institutional context of the Stationers' Company, which was the primary mechanism for policing comprint in practice long before courts were regularly called upon. Researchers relying solely on dictionary definitions will have an incomplete picture.
Jurisdictional Note
Comprint is an English law term with no recognized equivalent in American common law or colonial law. American intellectual property law developed along statutory lines from the first federal Copyright Act (1790) onward, bypassing the bookseller-guild framework in which comprint operated. The term does not appear in American case law with any significant presence.