Did we ever decide if this is a legit source for bus timetable information (which we can turn into PTv2 route variations)? All Stagecoach say on that page is
Welcome to the Stagecoach Open Data page, where you can download source data that we use across our digital services. ‘Open Data’ is data that has been made available to the public, for personal, educational or commercial use. […]
Bustimes.org cite this as one of their sources for some of the routes I’m interested. It also uses a lot of stuff that’s explicitly or implicitly licensed as OGL - NaPTAN and BODS being the main ones presented for other bus co.s
Under Terms of Use:
"You may not reproduce (in whole or in part), modify, de-compile, disassemble or transmit or use for any commercial purpose whatsoever any information from our website without contacting and obtaining the prior written consent of Stagecoach Bus.
You must not use any part of the content on our website for commercial purposes without obtaining a licence to do so from us or our licensors. "
So I would think no, not without permission?
Under Terms of Use:
it is common to find such a sentence in a generic place of websites, but from my understanding they do not invalidate specific licensing conditions attached to specific data offered for download.
Maybe, but as far I can tell the open data page doesn’t state what license they’re publishing under. It doesn’t seem to be in the individual files either.
In my opinion (as a non-lawyer who spends way too much time on this stuff) I don’t think this really constitutes a legally-coherent licence at all, let alone one which is compatible with OSM.
In the absence of a full set of licence terms you have to assume that it’s the website terms of use which apply.
I think in this case the best approach would be to contact them and ask if they’re happy for their data to be included in OSM under the terms of the ODbL. I wouldn’t recommend using this data in OSM until that’s been clarified.
It’s a legal requirement for this data to be open (presumably the Open Government Licence) for commercial and non-commercial use.
I didn’t see anything in that mandating a specific licence (although I did just skim it).
As OSM apparently has compatibility issues even with some of the Creative Commons licenses that allow commercial use I’m guessing we could run into similar issues with this data even if they have to let commercial use happen?
This all makes my head hurt and reminds me why I didn’t study law.
Is there any ‘higher level’ page that says where the requirements for open data comes from and what it must satisfy? All the discussion about which very special UK-only dialect of a European XML thing that carefully avoids being useful must be used all seems to be a bit too close to implementation level rather than overall policy.
Request for clarification or a proper license sent. I’ll update with anything I get back. Let me know if I need to say anything further to them.
Subject: Licensing query for Stagecoach Open Data: use by OpenStreetMap
From: Andrew Chadwick [personal email]
To: Stagecoach Data Team [see their portal page for the address]
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2024 19:40:43 +0100
Good morning. Long email, sorry!
I’m hoping I can clarify how a large mapping project I volunteer for can use the Stagecoach Open Data datasets, as published at https://www.stagecoachbus.com/open-data.
Would it be possible for us - the OpenStreetMap project - to incorporate your Stagecoach Open Data datasets into our database, for global reuse under our current database license?
Consensus within our community is that we would need a formal statement of permission from Stagecoach allowing our uses, or better still a formal license text that’s compatible with the ODbL/DbCL (see below).
I am writing as a volunteer mapper for the community-driven OpenStreetMap project. I’m not a member of the OpenStreetMap Foundation or the License Working Group, just one of thousands of international volunteers trying to make good public maps for everyone.
To give you an idea of the OpenStreetMap project’s scope and practice regarding bus data, the OpenStreetMap database does not hold real-time tracking data or even timetable data directly, just derived information about bus stops and route variants (which are typically resolved to sequences of roads in our existing road data, but not always). The whole OpenStreetMap dataset is licensed under the terms of the Open Data Commons Open Database License, or ODbL for short, a license which we’ve chosen to ensure continued public access to the data, and continued public rights permitting edits and reuse/remixing of it. Rights in individual contents of ODbL databases are automatically licensed under the Open Data Commons Database Contents License, or DbCL for short. Think of a Wikipedia-like map that everyone can edit directly and reuse freely, and that’s us.
(Or as they write about us: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap)
I (personally) would like to use your open data to improve OpenStreetMap for public transport data consumers in my area, and I’m sure many other volunteer mappers in the UK would find it useful as well for that purpose and many others. There is a slight licensing/permission problem, however.
Your portal page (https://www.stagecoachbus.com/open-data) states only that “‘Open Data’ is data that has been made available to the public, for personal, educational or commercial use”, but I cannot see a formal license for it that has any legal detail. Your definition of what open data is does indeed seem to align with ours in intent and scope, but we cannot really be sure that we can use your open data the way we want without a formal license text or explicit permission from you. At present, the portal page’s text doesn’t seem like enough of a license grant to override your website’s general Terms of Website Use section, which of course withholds all rights in its Intellectual Property Rights section.
The “personal, [or] educational[,] or commercial use clause” on your portal page seems more hopeful, but that wording is not backed by a blanket license explicitly permitting incorporation of your data into ours, and most crucially, that data’s formal (re-)licensing under the ODbL/DbCL.
There are two obvious ways forward, from our perspective.
Would you be willing to provide us with a formal statement of permission granting the OpenStreetMap project and all its contributors permission to include your Stagecoach Open Data in OSM under the terms of the ODbL and the DbCL that covers individual database contents? If you provide such a statement, I will be happy to pass it on to the UK OpenStreetMap community via this thread and record the fact on our wikis and other guideline documents.
A formal published license would be better for most data consumers, not just us.
One widespread license used for UK data, used for the NaPTAN and BODS public transit datasets that we use for the purposes stated above, is the UK Open Government License (OGL) version 3.0 (or 2.0). The OSM licence working group has already determined that this license is compatible with the ODbL. If you are using that particular license, please let us know, as much will already have been resolved!
Thanks in advance for your time and patience reading this,
Andrew Chadwick
OpenStreetMap contributor since 2008, Oxford, UK
No reply yet. I’ve sent a chaser email.
Update: I got an acknowledgement email on Fri 20 Sep. Should have a reply witin 10 working days.
Whoever does their legal or open data stuff probably hasn’t even had a chance to look at it yet. It’s a big company I’d expect it to be quite a while before anything meaningful trickles through if it ever does.
Following on from:
It seems that for what it’s worth there is a Bus open data policy page which references the Public Service Vehicle Open Data England Regulations. Section 16 seems to put restrictions on the use of the data provided to and then published by the Secretary of State.
From what I see the restrictions include specific statements and attribution in the “App” using the data. An “App” being specifically defined in Section 2:
“App” means a software programme, for use on an electronic device, which provides passengers with information about the planned and current operation of relevant local services in order to help them make informed decisions about their journeys;
As OSM doesn’t have control over what apps and other data consumers display beyond the requirement to attribute OSM somewhere I don’t think stuff provided through the Bus Open Data Service is that promising.
As mentioned above though, I’m not a lawyer so don’t rely on my reasoning for anything. I don’t even know if the stuff I happened to stumble on is the latest information or completely out of date. If there’s anything remotely novel about a data source it should probably be run past LWG before it gets used in OSM.
Hi. I’m probably late to the conversation here but thought I’d pass on information from my previous experience of trying to get licencing information from Stagecoach regarding their open data.
For context, I help run the Open Data Scotland project (https://opendata.scot) where we index all known open data portals hosting Scottish open data on our website. About a year ago I’d gotten in contact with Stagecoach as I’d noticed their open data page and wanted to know what licence they published it under.
From what I can can recall from the conversation I ended up having with them (which was a Teams call so I don’t have any written record other than my notes), they said that their data was unlicenced and published with no restrictions. When I suggested that they should maybe attach a licence to the datasets they published, they appeared reluctant to do so unless it was something that was laid out in legislation or guidance from something official like the Bus Open Data Service. In fact, I got the impression that they didn’t seem interested in engaging with feedback from civic society at all.
@Andrew_Chadwick I’d be interested to see if you get any different a response than what I got last year.
I may be unreasonable pessimistic, but I think that sounds like they grudgingly have links there to satisfy government requirements and they have no real desire for the data to be used any more broadly than the regulations allow.