There seems to be a lot of fragments on the wiki added by the maps usual suspects. Are these going on maps at some point?

The extracts are from old-maps.co.uk, which have extensive 1960s coverage of the UK, where some obscure road numbers can be found. They can't go on Maps due to copyright reasons - small snippets count as fair use, wholescale lifting, er, doesn't. The Old Maps FAQ states as much

As I have ranted (and that's the most reasonable verb to use), the way the Ordnance Survey is structured is that you can't get more higher resolution maps than 1:50,000 unless you're a profit making organisation. Old Maps are, we aren't.

1961 is out of Crown Copyright, hence my query.

That you had fair use snippets of Old Maps was an option in my mind, though I didn't think you could tolerate their awful interface.

The maps are indeed out of copyright, but the scans provided by the OS to Old Maps aren't. If we had our own copies of the six inch maps (tricky, as they tended not to be sold commercially!), we could scan those in and they would be out of copyright.

Their interface sucks, and it drives me up the wall. However, if it's the only way of identifying road numbers, we have to use what we have. All the examples I've put up today though, have been where I've identified an un-numbered B road on the New Popular or Seventh Series maps and done a specific search for that area on Old Maps. It took about ten minutes to get the right map each time!

Old Maps have significantly downgraded their interface in the last few weeks and removed the Enhanced Zoom and Full Screen facilities. It really has made their site an unusable resource now compared to what was previously there.

What a miserable lot! I wasn't aware of full screen but I used enhanced zoom quite a lot. I noticed it wasn't working one time recently, but as it was late night at a weekend I assumed that it was because some server was down for maintenance.

It's still described in the help system.

I suppose they thought people were using it to avoid buying their paper maps. That is after all their source of income.

I was tempted to change my signature to "SABRE Maps - all the best maps in one place, and our UI sucks less than old-maps.co.uk" but felt that would be a bit too much like pot stirring.

You have to make an annual profit in order to keep hosting copyrighted OS Material, so they're probably seriously encouraging people to spend cash.

Anyway, since we now have full 1:25,000 coverage of England and Wales courtesy of that nice lot at the NLS, it matters less.

I was trying to work out what number this B road in Poole had. The 1:2,500 maps on Old Maps have the number, but the resolution isn't good enough for me to work out what!

Any ideas what the street name/s has ?

Click on the link I supplied and select "OpenStreetMap"

If you look on the 1930s 1:2500 near the A35 junction (or the other end of the road), the road number is in larger type: B3090 (which was also my guess at the number in smaller type on the 1950s edition).

Thanks for that. It was my understanding, based on looking at six inch maps in the National Archives, that road numbers didn't appear on 1:10,000 and 1:2,500 maps until the 1940s, so I didn't think to look at a 1930s one. Certainly the ones I was looking at of Winchester and Guildford yesterday didn't have any numbers.

The B3090 here is of course a recycled number, as everyone knows, the original incarnation is now part of the A303.

I wouldn't have thought that the scans could be copyrighted as they are just straight copies, they aren't a derivative work. I'm by no means a copyright expert but that's just seems to defy common sense?

Maybe, but that's the legal position.

The easiest way to explain it is with an example, that the Mona Lisa is "out of copyright", but photographs taken of it are the copyright of the photographer. Scanning works the same way.

It is nosense but true I am afraid: http://boingboing.net/2009/07/20/uk-nat ... trait.html

The concept is that a copy is a reinterpretation of the work. You do not copyright the work itself, but your interpretation of it. For perfect scanned copies this is clearly flawed. Where it makes more sense is in the photograph example, clearly the photographer does not make a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa, but an image of the pointing hanging in it surrounds, making choices about framing distance and whatever.

Thanks guys, makes things clearer now.