DSF

Hi.

Looking for a terrain map of a certain area that is not copyrighted, obviously i could grab my online maps i have and use that but i don't want to break any laws so looking for a fairly detailed map that is free for commercial repo or part repo.

Any help very much appreciated

thanks
Rob

I was looking at maps last weekend. Ordnance Survey maps were Crown copyright. Copyright expires for those after 50 years, so 1967 maps were out of copyright from memory. Ordnance Survey is now a government owned Ltd company, so you'll never be able to use modern maps. Hunting through various online libraries was time consuming and fruitless. Even some of those vintage maps had modern publishing copyright deals.

I reckon that the people who do map design products have collected up out of copyright atlases and scanned them. If anyone knows where you can get CDs of scanned vintage UK/ USA maps, I'd be interested.

Nightmare ain't it lol

We're now doing production for a company who license maps from OS to design their personalised products - it aint cheap, but is certainly possible - you just need to know the market you want to sell into, and have your costings and margins right

On the other hand, we have a designer friend doing personalised maps using open source mapping as the basis for her designs, although she does tweak them in photoshop/illustrator, so they are highly stylised, but the free for her to use a starting point

Both ways work, just depends on your business model and market

Thank you, Tried a version earlier and not sure it is even right now for the look i want, oh well back to the drawing board lol thanks all.

Would commissioning an artist to draw a map of the area you require work?

This question is a bit out of my depth, but I would have thought supplying an artist on Etsy loads of references (i.e. modern maps) and asking them to draw in their style would be OK?

Just punting this out there, so could be very wide of the mark

Some of the OS stuff is covered by the Open Govt. Licence and is available to download for free. You are entitled to use this for commercial use.
https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/busine ... licensing/

Thanks will take a look