PRINTING

Definition

The art or process of impressing legible characters, letters, or images onto paper, cloth, or other material through mechanical means. In legal contexts, printing appears most often in three settings: (1) as a subject of patent and intellectual property law, where the methods and machinery of printing have been litigated extensively; (2) as a component of press and publication law, intersecting with libel, censorship, and freedom of the press; and (3) as a cost and procedural matter in litigation, particularly regarding what printing expenses are taxable as court costs.

Common Language

Modern common usage (Wiktionary): The process or business of producing printed material by means of inked type and a printing press or similar technology; also used to mean a single print run, printed matter generally, or handwritten unjoined characters. Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The act, art, or practice of impressing letters, characters, or figures on paper, cloth, or other material; the business of a printer, including typesetting and presswork; typography; also the production of photographic prints. The legal and common meanings are closely aligned at the definitional core, but the legal context gives "printing" added dimensions that ordinary usage omits. In patent law, printing as a mechanical art raised questions about the patentability of processes versus products. In libel law, what counts as "printing" determines whether a publication qualifies as a libel (written defamation) rather than slander (spoken), a distinction with significant procedural and damages consequences. The ordinary speaker's understanding of printing as simply making text on paper does not capture these legal stakes.

Common Confusion

Printing and publishing are sometimes used interchangeably in common speech but are distinct in law. Printing refers to the mechanical production of impressions. Publishing, in both defamation and copyright law, refers to the act of communicating the resulting material to a third party. A document may be printed without being published in the legal sense, and something may be published without traditional print technology. Researchers working in historical sources should be alert to this distinction, as courts and treatise writers did not always maintain it rigorously.

Why It Matters in Research

The primary research trap is temporal scope. "Printing" as a legal term of art was most actively developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the printing press was the dominant means of mass communication and the subject of significant patent litigation. By the twentieth century, the term largely receded from independent legal significance and was absorbed into broader categories — publication, press freedom, intellectual property — that modern researchers are more likely to search directly. For patent research, the circuit court cases from the late nineteenth century are essential. Bouvier flags that taxable costs in patent cases did not include printing expenditures (charts, models, briefs, printed records), but noted that practice varied by circuit. Researchers using historical reporters should not assume uniformity across federal circuits on this procedural point. For press and libel research, "printing" connects directly to the historical definition of libel as a written or printed defamation, distinguishing it from spoken slander. Historical sources consistently treat printing as the vehicle by which a defamatory statement becomes permanent and therefore actionable as libel rather than slander. This distinction carries different damage rules in many jurisdictions. Researchers working on defamation history need to trace how courts extended "printing" to cover lithography, photography, and eventually electronic reproduction. For constitutional research, printing is the technological substrate underlying freedom of the press. Early First Amendment materials use "printing" and "press" almost interchangeably. Modern press freedom doctrine has expanded well beyond printing technology, but historical sources assume printing as the referent. Researchers should not read modern broad press freedom doctrine back into early constitutional materials that were drafted specifically with the printing press in mind.

Historical Dictionary Support

All three source dictionaries define printing identically at the core: the art of impressing letters, the art of making books or papers by impressing legible characters. This uniformity reflects the term's status as a technical description rather than a contested legal concept requiring doctrinal definition. Black's (2nd ed.) is the most useful of the three for legal research purposes because it attaches case references — Arthur v. Moller (97 U.S. 365) and Le Roy v. Jamison (15 Fed. Cas. 373) — situating the definition in patent law contexts. The entry appears to have been truncated in available sources (the Forbes Lithograph citation is incomplete), but researchers should pursue that line of patent cases in the circuit court reporters. Bouvier adds the most distinctive legal content by addressing taxable costs in patent litigation and directing researchers to the entries for LIBEL and LIBERTY OF THE PRESS. This cross-referencing is genuinely useful: it confirms that printing as a standalone term has limited independent legal significance, and that its legal substance is carried in adjacent doctrines. What the historical dictionaries do not address is the question of whether non-typographic processes — lithography, engraving, photography, and later electrostatic and digital reproduction — qualify as "printing" for various legal purposes. That question became practically significant in the twentieth century and is largely absent from these sources.

Jurisdictional Note

Taxable printing costs in federal litigation varied by circuit in the nineteenth century, as Bouvier notes, and practitioners should not assume a single federal rule. State courts developed their own rules on what counted as printed publication for libel purposes and what printing disclosures were required in election law, commercial regulation, and newspaper licensing statutes. These rules diverge significantly and require jurisdiction-specific research.

Encyclopedia Cross-Reference

Law Mind Encyclopedia — Press, Freedom of Law Mind Encyclopedia — Libel Law Mind Encyclopedia — Patent Law (Process Patents)

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