Licence

Last updated: 27 August 2026

Where the map comes from, and what we claim

The historical maps we sell are in the public domain. Their authors have been dead for centuries and no copyright subsists in the sheets themselves. We do not claim copyright in them, and we would be wrong to — under EU law, a faithful reproduction of a public-domain work of visual art gives rise to no new right unless the result is itself original.

What we do claim is our own work: the restoration, the measurement, the assembled archive package and the written passport. To the extent that work is original, it is protected. To the extent it is a faithful copy of the old sheet, it is not, and we say so.

Beyond copyright, your permission to use the file rests on this licence as a contract, which you accept when you buy. That works whether or not any copyright attaches, which is exactly why we prefer to be honest about the copyright question rather than clever about it.

What you may do

  • Print it, as many times as you like, for yourself. Any size, any paper, any print service. There is no per-print fee and no reporting.
  • Frame it and hang it at home, in an office, in a studio, in a restaurant.
  • Give a print as a gift.
  • Crop it, resize it, or convert it for your own printing purposes.
  • Use it as decoration in a film, a photograph or a room set that you are producing.
  • Keep the file. The licence has no end date and no renewal.

What you may not do

  • Resell, share or give away the digital file itself, or any file derived from it, in any format. The print you make is yours; the file is licensed to you alone.
  • Upload it to a stock library, a print-on-demand marketplace, an NFT platform or any site that redistributes files.
  • Sell prints of it commercially — as merchandise, in a shop, or on a print-on-demand service — without a commercial licence from us. Write to us; this is usually a short conversation and a fair price, not a refusal.
  • Use it as a trademark or logo, or in any way that suggests we endorse your product.
  • Use it, or any part of it, to train machine-learning models, or include it in a dataset assembled for that purpose. This is not a formality: a set of measured, documented restorations is precisely the sort of material that is worth scraping, and we are not supplying it for that.
  • Claim the restoration as your own work.

Attribution

You do not have to credit us on a print you hang at home. If you publish the image anywhere — a book, an article, a website, a video — a line naming the source archive and the shelfmark is welcome and helps the next reader find the original. The passport PDF in your archive gives the exact wording.

Where the source archive asks for a credit of its own — some collections release scans under a licence that requires attribution — the product page and the passport say so, and that credit is not optional.

If you want to do more

Commercial print runs, publishing, product design, packaging, large-scale display: all of these are possible and none of them are covered by the standard licence. Write to hello@oldmapstudio.com with what you have in mind. We would rather license the thing properly than discover it later.

What happens if the licence is broken

The licence ends. Anything you have printed under it stays yours; the permission to use the file does not survive.

Which law applies

This licence is governed by Slovak law. If you are a consumer, that choice does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory rules of the country where you live.

The shop does not take payments yet. The full terms of sale and the withdrawal rules will be published here when it does, and this licence will form part of both. Until then, write to us with any question about use.