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Recognising OS Material

Anything that looks at all like a map is probably derived from Ordnance Survey material.

It can be simple to recognise maps where OS owns the copyright from the footnotes that are printed on all OS paper maps, for example: ‘Made and published by Ordnance Survey, Southampton’ and ‘© Crown copyright year’ or from the OS copyright acknowledgement which should appear on all hard copy maps produced within HCC.

Some digital material is easily recognised since it is very similar to the printed versions but some data, like OS Boundary-Line for example, is not so obvious.

OS retain intellectual property rights in mapping and data derived from their copyright material. So almost all GIS data in use in HCC has an element of OS copyright. You can confirm this by checking the metadata.

For example an ArcView shapefile of the Coroner’s Division boundaries derived from OS Boundary-Line has joint OS and HCC copyright. HCC copyright exists because it was made by us and OS copyright because we adapted OS Boundary-Line to make it. Similarly an ArcView shapefile of the Public Rights of Way has joint HCC and OS copyright because we made it by digitising over the lines shown on an OS 1:10,000 scale map.

Even the National Grid is the intellectual property of OS and databases containing National Grid References are covered by Crown copyright.

Wherever OS material is reproduced you are reminded that it is a legal requirement that the appropriate OS copyright acknowledgement is displayed.