Policy on use of documents located on AustLII
("AustLII Usage Policy")

1. General principles

(a) The Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) is a not-for-profit publisher that provides free (ie non-charged) access to individual end-users of the content it provides, to enable them to read, print and copy materials for their personal use, and any other uses permitted by copyright law.

(b) In order to provide this service, AustLII has built a collection of primary and secondary legal materials (including cases, legislation, treaties, journal articles and law reform documents) by agreements with the various sources of the documents and rights-holders in the documents, and by other means such as scanning documents where documents are out of copyright or with the permission of copyright holders.

(c) AustLII is not a data repository and does not provide a service for other publishers or systems to obtain documents from AustLII for republication or for uses related to artificial intelligence (AI-related use) or other automated systems. Other publishers or systems should obtain those documents from their original sources or by other appropriate and authorised means.

(d) In relation to all documents that it republishes, AustLII does not give permission for the value-added content that it adds to documents (including hypertext mark-up and alternative citations) to be republished by others or used for AI-related or automated purposes.

(e) AustLII places particular restrictions upon the ways in which case-law documents on AustLII can be copied and used. AustLII specifically restricts, via the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP), all spiders and other automated agents from accessing and copying its case-law. Additionally, AustLII blocks automated access to all materials for AI-related uses across its entire collection. AustLII allows (via the REP) access to its materials other than case law only for the purpose of the operation of search engines and not for AI-related uses. The reasons for these policies include:

(i) the need to balance personal privacy against open access, particularly in relation to general-purpose search engines;

(ii) the need to allow compliance with take-down, anonymisation and other modification requests from courts and parties;

(iii) the need to comply with licence conditions under which data has been provided to AustLII; and

(iv) the need to prevent unauthorised AI-related use of legal materials.

(f) For the purposes of this policy, references to “artificial intelligence”, “AI-related use”, or “automated systems” are intended to be technology-neutral and apply to any current or future computational system that performs functions analogous to learning, inference, classification, generation, reasoning, decision-support, prediction, summarisation, or semantic retrieval, regardless of how such systems are described, branded, implemented, or technically achieved, and whether such capabilities arise from statistical, symbolic, neural, hybrid, or other methods.

(g) AustLII may block, rate-limit, or take other technical and legal measures, without notice, against activities that breach or attempt to circumvent this policy or AustLII’s access controls.

2. End use

(a) Individual end-users of the AustLII system are free to access, copy and print materials for their own use in accordance with copyright law.

(b) In relation to case law, this access is subject to the restrictions set out in clause (1)(e).

3. Copyright in content on AustLII

(a) AustLII is not the copyright owner in the source documents published on AustLII and is not able to give permission for reproduction of those source documents.

(b) AustLII claims copyright in all value-added content that it adds to source documents (including hypertext mark-up and alternative citations). On request, AustLII usually gives permission for reproduction of examples of this content for teaching, educational training or similar purposes, excluding AI-related uses.

4. Reuse of AustLII data by other commercial and non-commercial systems

(a) AustLII will not act as a data repository or re-supplier of source documents that it has obtained from their original sources to other publishers or systems for republication or for AI-related or automated uses. This applies to both:

(i) active provision or licensing of documents or data feeds; and

(ii) passive or indirect re-supply via spidering, scraping, crawling, mirroring, page framing, API access, bulk querying, automated agents, or other programmatic means, whether such collection or use is direct or indirect and whether materials are cached, transformed, vectorised, embedded, tokenised, summarised, or otherwise processed. Where such activity is apparent or reasonably inferred, it will be blocked or otherwise restricted.

5. Use of AustLII legal materials in AI systems and automated frameworks

(a) AustLII’s legal materials (including case law, legislation, treaties, journal articles, law reform documents, and any associated metadata or value-added content, including citations) may not be used, directly or indirectly, to train, fine-tune, evaluate, develop, operate, or provide inputs to artificial intelligence systems, machine learning models, automated reasoning tools, or functionally equivalent systems. This prohibition applies regardless of:

(i) the technical architecture or methodology used;

(ii) whether the system is described as artificial intelligence, analytics, automation, decision-support, augmentation, or otherwise;

(iii) whether the use occurs at training time, inference time, retrieval time, or through intermediate processing; or

(iv) whether the system is operated by a human, an automated agent, or a hybrid workflow.

(b) Without limitation, and for the avoidance of doubt, prohibited uses include:

(i) training, fine-tuning, or evaluating computational models or systems, including large language models, retrieval-augmented generation systems, or successor technologies;

(ii) creating embeddings, vector representations, semantic indexes, knowledge graphs, or other computational derivatives of AustLII materials for use in automated or AI-enabled systems;

(iii) systematic extraction, harvesting, pre-processing, transformation, or annotation of AustLII materials for inclusion in datasets for present or future use by AI or automated systems;

(iv) automated or programmatic querying of AustLII materials where results are stored, cached, reused, analysed, ranked, or incorporated into the behaviour, memory, or outputs of an automated or AI-enabled system;

(v) integration of AustLII materials into AI-enabled or automated legal reasoning, research, analysis, advice, drafting, prediction, classification, triage, or decision-support systems; and

(vi) reproducing, summarising, paraphrasing, or otherwise incorporating AustLII materials including value-added elements, into AI-generated or automated outputs, whether deterministically or probabilistically generated.

(c) These restrictions apply regardless of whether access to AustLII materials was obtained manually, programmatically, or through a combination of methods, and regardless of whether the system is used for commercial, non-commercial or any other purpose. This prohibition includes outputs that substantially reproduce or restate AustLII content, whether verbatim or paraphrased.

This policy may be amended at AustLII’s discretion.