The TEL TSI does not prescribe an open licence. It prescribes four - and which one applies turns entirely on the category of data. Miss that, and you either publish more restrictively than permitted and fall short of an access obligation, or more openly than intended and give away commercial control of your own data.
The framework
Recital 13 of Regulation (EU) 2026/253 identifies Creative Commons licences as the recommended standard for open licences and points specifically at the CC 4.0 licence suite. The Annex implements that by assigning a named CC licence to individual data categories.
The decisive wording is the clause attached to every one of those assignments: access is to be granted under the conditions of the named licence "or any other equivalent or less restrictive open licence". The named licence is therefore a ceiling on restrictiveness, not a fixed text. You may never be more restrictive; you may always be more open.
Practical consequence: "we use CC BY-NC-ND everywhere, it's the safest option" is not a conservative choice. CC BY-NC-ND is the most restrictive licence in the scheme - for 8 of the 13 data categories it would be more restrictive than the Annex permits.
Four licences, thirteen assignments
The Annex carries thirteen licence assignments across four distinct CC licences. The building blocks that make the difference: NC (non-commercial) excludes commercial reuse, SA (share-alike) forces onward sharing on the same terms, ND (no derivatives) prohibits modified versions.
| Annex point | Data | Licence | Obligated actor | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2.3.10 | Working timetable | CC BY-ND 4.0 | Infrastructure manager | Art. 5 |
| 2.5.1(5) | Train composition | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 | Infrastructure manager (reusing RU data) | Art. 5 |
| 2.6.1(4) | Train traffic data | CC BY-SA 4.0 | Infrastructure manager / freight facility | Art. 5 |
| 3.2(4) | Movements of freight wagons and their load | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 | Freight RUs via a joint web UI | Art. 4 |
| 3.3.1(3) | Freight-specific reference data | CC BY-ND 4.0 | Responsible telematics stakeholders | Art. 4 |
| 3.3.2(4) | Rolling stock reference databases | CC BY-ND 4.0 | Vehicle keepers | Art. 4 |
| 3.3.3(4) | Intermodal loading unit reference databases | CC BY-ND 4.0 | ILU keepers | Art. 4 |
| 4.2.1(3) | Passenger timetable data | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 | Passenger RU / data holder | Art. 6(1) |
| 4.2.2(3) | Connection times | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 | Station manager / data holder | Art. 6(2) |
| 4.3.1(4) | Tariff data | CC BY-ND 4.0 | Passenger RU / data holder | Art. 6(3) |
| 4.4.1(2) | Conditions of carriage | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 | Passenger RU | Art. 6(1) |
| 4.4.3.2(2) | Station accessibility data (ERSAD) | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 | Entity in charge of accessibility data | PRM TSI |
| 4.7.1.1(3) | Information in the station | CC BY-ND 4.0 | Station manager / IM / data holder | Art. 4 |
The case that surprises implementers
Two data categories held by the same passenger railway undertaking sit side by side and are treated in opposite directions.
Tariff data - Annex point 4.3.1(4) - must be made accessible under CC BY-ND 4.0. BY-ND carries no NC clause: commercial reuse of the unmodified data is permitted. A distributor may build a paid product on your fares.
Conditions of carriage - Annex point 4.4.1(2) - must be made accessible under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, that is, expressly for non-commercial use only.
The counter-intuitive part is the direction. Conditions of carriage must be made public and free of charge under Article 6(1), and still carry the more restrictive licence. Tariff data, by contrast, only has to be made accessible at all under Article 6(3) where a contractual right or obligation to do so exists - and carries the more permissive one. The category with the weaker access duty is the one with the broader reuse permission.
Article 6(3), second subparagraph, softens this: additional terms for direct access to and commercial use of tariff data may be agreed on a contractual basis. Annex point 2.5.1(6) provides a comparable route for train composition data. That contractual layer sits alongside the licence; it does not replace it.
What this means for implementation
- The licence decision is made per data category, not per company and not per interface. A single site-wide licence statement covering the whole data estate is not compatible with the Annex.
- The licence must travel with the data in machine-readable form - the access routes are the national access points and the common Union web UI, not a corporate website.
- Freight RUs are not exempt: rolling stock and intermodal loading unit reference data (points 3.3.2 and 3.3.3) carry CC BY-ND, while wagon movement data shared through a joint web UI (point 3.2(4)) carries CC BY-NC-SA.
- Reusing third-party data means inheriting its licence terms. Under an SA licence that propagates into your own derived product.
References
Every point cited above refers to the Annex to Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/253 of 6 February 2026 (TEL TSI), OJ L, 2026/253, CELEX 32026R0253. The official text governs:
Regulation (EU) 2026/253 - official text (EUR-Lex, EN)
We cross-check the language versions of the regulation against each other and have a clarification request open with the ERA on one individual point. This article sets out the licensing scheme and is not legal advice; the official wording of the relevant language version always governs. TEL TSI Compliance Companion is an independent tool and is not affiliated with the European Union Agency for Railways (ERA).
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