Are Maps Copyrighted? Fair Use, Public Domain, and Digital Maps

Yes, maps are copyrighted in most cases. Federal copyright law lists maps among the categories of protected works, so a commercially produced map, atlas, or digital mapping product carries copyright from the moment it’s created.¹ What copyright actually covers, though, is the mapmaker’s creative expression, not the geographic facts underneath it. That distinction controls what you can freely use and what needs permission.

What Copyright Covers on a Map

Copyright attaches to the creative choices a cartographer makes when turning raw data into a visual product. That includes which features to show and which to omit, the arrangement and layout of information, color schemes, custom symbols, artistic terrain rendering, typography, and the overall visual design. A mapmaker who highlights hiking trails in green dashes, shades elevation bands in watercolor tones, and labels only towns above a certain population has made dozens of original choices, and those choices collectively receive protection.¹

The creative bar is low. A map does not need to be artistically impressive. It only needs to be independently created and possess at least a minimal degree of originality. The Supreme Court set that standard in Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service, holding that copyright in a factual compilation extends only to the author’s original contributions in selection and arrangement, never to the underlying facts.²

What Copyright Does Not Cover

Geographic facts belong to everyone. Street names, city locations, coastline shapes, elevation data, coordinates, and the physical layout of roads and rivers are not copyrightable no matter how much effort went into collecting them. You cannot own the fact that Main Street runs north-south or that a lake sits at 4,200 feet elevation.¹

Standard mapping conventions are also outside copyright. A compass rose in the corner, a scale bar at the bottom, blue for water, and widely recognized symbols for churches, hospitals, or airports are so universal that no single mapmaker can claim them. The general idea of mapping a particular region is likewise unprotectable. Anyone can make a map of downtown Chicago. They just can’t copy someone else’s creative design of that map.

When Map Copyrights Expire

For a map created by an individual author on or after January 1, 1978, copyright lasts for the author’s life plus 70 years. For a map produced as a work for hire, which covers most maps made by employees of mapping companies, protection runs 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, whichever comes first.³

Older maps follow different rules, and the public domain cutoff moves forward each January. As of January 1, 2026, all works published in the United States before 1931 are in the public domain. You can freely reproduce a 1930 road atlas or a 1925 nautical chart without permission.

Maps published between 1931 and 1963 had to be renewed during their 28th year of copyright. If the copyright holder never filed a renewal, the map entered the public domain at the end of that initial term. Maps are worth checking carefully here: most pre-1964 works were never renewed, but maps had a higher renewal rate than average. If you’re dealing with a map from this era, searching the renewal records is worth the effort. Maps published from 1964 onward had their renewals made automatic, so they remain protected for the full term.

Government-Produced Maps

Maps created by U.S. federal government employees as part of their official duties carry no copyright and are in the public domain.⁴ That covers USGS topographic maps, Census Bureau maps, NOAA nautical charts, and National Park Service trail maps. The USGS confirms that its topographic maps are in the public domain, with narrow exceptions for certain third-party data layers embedded in its newer US Topo products produced from 2009 onward.⁵

State and local government maps are different. The federal public-domain rule applies only to the federal government. State and local governments can hold copyrights in maps their employees produce, and many do. If you want to use a county assessor’s parcel map or a state transportation department’s highway map, check with the agency directly rather than assuming it’s free.

How to Tell if a Specific Map Is Copyrighted

A copyright notice is the most visible signal. Under federal law, a proper notice includes the © symbol (or the word “Copyright”), the year of first publication, and the copyright owner’s name.⁶ But the absence of a notice does not mean a map is unprotected. For works created after March 1, 1989, a copyright notice is optional. Assume a map is protected unless you can confirm otherwise.

When the status is uncertain, the U.S. Copyright Office maintains searchable records through its Copyright Public Records Portal. The online collections cover registrations from 1870 to the present, with a Virtual Card Catalog for works registered between 1870 and 1977 and the Copyright Public Records System for works from 1978 onward.⁷ Searching the renewal records is especially useful for maps published between 1931 and 1963, since an unrenewed map from that period is now in the public domain.

Fair Use and Maps

Fair use allows limited copying of copyrighted material without permission for purposes like criticism, commentary, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. Courts weigh four factors together:⁸

The purpose and character of the use. Nonprofit, educational, or transformative uses weigh in your favor. Purely commercial copying weighs against you.
The nature of the copyrighted work. Maps are primarily factual, which gives you more leeway than copying a purely creative work like a painting or novel.
The amount used. Reproducing a small portion of a large atlas is more defensible than copying an entire standalone map. Even a small excerpt can fail this factor if it captures the most distinctive creative element.
The effect on the market. If your use substitutes for the original, so that people would take your copy instead of buying the mapmaker’s product, this factor cuts strongly against fair use.

No single factor is decisive. A geography professor projecting a copyrighted map in a lecture has a strong fair use argument. A blogger embedding someone’s full illustrated trail map to decorate a hiking article has a much weaker one, because the use isn’t transformative and could substitute for the original. The factual nature of maps gives fair use arguments more room here than in many other copyright disputes, but “it’s just a map” is not a defense on its own.

Legal Ways to Use a Copyrighted Map

When fair use doesn’t apply and the map isn’t in the public domain, you still have options.

You can license the map directly. Contact the copyright holder and negotiate a written license specifying how many copies you can make, where you can display the map, how long the permission lasts, and what fee applies. Commercial map publishers often have standard licensing programs.

You can look for maps released under open licenses. Some mapmakers publish work under Creative Commons licenses. A CC BY license, for example, lets you copy, redistribute, and even adapt the map for commercial purposes, as long as you credit the creator. Read the specific license version attached to the map, since some Creative Commons variants prohibit commercial use or derivative works.⁹

You can use public domain maps. Federal government maps, maps with expired copyrights, and maps whose copyrights were never renewed are all free to use.

You can build your own map from independent research and publicly available data. The key word is original. Tracing someone else’s map and changing the colors is not original creation. It’s an unauthorized derivative work. A derivative work is any new work based on a preexisting copyrighted work, including editorial revisions, annotations, or modifications that add original expression.¹⁰ If you take a copyrighted trail map and add your own campsite icons and elevation profiles, your additions may be original, but you still needed the original mapmaker’s permission to create the derivative in the first place.

Digital Maps Have an Extra Layer

Copyright is only part of the equation with digital mapping services. Google Maps, Apple Maps, and similar platforms layer contractual restrictions on top of copyright law through their terms of service, and those restrictions often go further than copyright alone.

Google Maps

Google permits unaltered screenshots of Google Maps and Google Earth in publications of 5,000 or fewer copies without requesting permission, as long as you follow their attribution guidelines and don’t alter the interface.¹¹ You can add annotations or custom labels using third-party software, but you cannot change the map’s colors or remove Google’s attribution. Screenshots cannot be used as the core navigational material in a guidebook. Commercial applications that integrate Google Maps into a website or app require using Google Maps Platform, which has its own pricing and terms.¹² Street View screenshots are prohibited in print publications entirely.

OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap is the major open-data alternative. Its map data is released under the Open Database License, which allows personal and commercial use as long as you provide attribution and share any adapted databases under the same license. Attribution should read “© OpenStreetMap” or “Map data from OpenStreetMap” and must link to openstreetmap.org/copyright, or print out that URL in physical media.¹³ If you render OSM data with your own custom styling, you own the copyright in your visual design layer but still owe attribution for the underlying data.

What Happens if You Copy a Map Without Permission

Copying a copyrighted map without permission can trigger both actual and statutory damages. If the copyright holder can prove how much money they lost or how much profit the infringer gained, the court can award those actual damages. Copyright holders often elect statutory damages instead, which don’t require proof of specific financial harm.

Statutory damages range from $750 to $30,000 per work infringed, as the court considers appropriate. If the infringement was willful, the court can raise that ceiling to $150,000 per work. If the infringer proves they had no reason to believe their copying was illegal, the court can reduce the minimum to $200.¹⁴ The court also has discretion to award the winning party its attorney’s fees, which in copyright cases can easily exceed the damages themselves.¹⁵

These penalties apply per work, not per copy. Reproducing one copyrighted map in 10,000 brochures is a single act of infringement for damages purposes, though the scale of distribution factors into where the court lands within the statutory range. Willfulness is where most defendants get burned. Continuing to use a map after receiving a cease-and-desist letter, for example, makes it very hard to argue the infringement was innocent.

If You Made the Map

Copyright exists automatically the moment you fix your original map in tangible form, on paper or in a saved file. Registration with the U.S. Copyright Office is optional but carries real benefits. You cannot file a copyright infringement lawsuit over a U.S. work until you’ve registered the copyright, or had a registration application refused.¹⁶ If you register before the infringement occurs, or within three months of publication, you also become eligible for statutory damages and attorney’s fees, which changes the economics of enforcement.

Maps are registered using a visual arts application. The filing fee is $45 for a single-author work filed online when the author is also the claimant and the work is not made for hire. A standard online application costs $65, and paper filings run $125.¹⁷

1
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 USC 102 – Subject Matter of Copyright In General
2
Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Feist Publications Inc v Rural Tel Serv Co 499 US 340 (1991)
3
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 USC 302 – Duration of Copyright Works Created on or After January 1 1978
4
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. Title 17 Copyrights – Section 105 Subject Matter of Copyright United States Government Works
5
U.S. Geological Survey. Are USGS Topographic Maps Copyrighted
6
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 USC 401 – Notice of Copyright Visually Perceptible Copies
7
U.S. Copyright Office. Copyright Public Records Portal
8
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 USC 107 – Limitations on Exclusive Rights Fair Use
9
Creative Commons. Attribution 4.0 International CC BY 4.0 Deed
10
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 USC 101 – Definitions
11
About Google. Brand Resource Center – Guidance – Media
12
About Google. Brand Resource Center Geo Guidelines
13
OpenStreetMap Foundation. Licence Attribution Guidelines
14
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 USC 504 – Remedies for Infringement Damages and Profits
15
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 USC 505 – Remedies for Infringement Costs and Attorneys Fees
16
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 USC 411 – Registration and Civil Infringement Actions
17
U.S. Copyright Office. Fees