In order to operate a free access service, if you cannot obtain a steady flow of the legal data in computerised form from the official source, then you have no hope of providing anything. It is no solace to know that the data is in theory in the public domain if you do not have any access to it in computerised form. We are not in the business of scanning judgments or re-keying legislation or anything like that. In the five years AustLII has operated, we have never entered into any discussions about copyright issues with courts, tribunals or offices of parliamentary counsel, other than providing whatever notice they request on the front of the data they provide to us indicating their view of the matter, or signing a standard formal licence agreement. The moral of our experience is that copyright issues should not be allowed to be used as a distraction from providing free access.
Access is simply a policy issue.
In terms of access, over one million pages are accessed per week according to our logs. Actual usage is higher than that because we do not see the many hits that come to proxy servers, we only see the ones that actually get through directly to us. So actual usage of our data, we think, is considerably higher than a million hits a week. It costs us less than one cent to deliver the full text of a case or a section of an Act to our users. We think this give AustLII a fairly unarguable case that this is an economically efficient way to provide access to the law.