Do visit the Law Report website where you can download podcasts, read transcripts and leave comments. And we also have links to all the decisions we discussed today. We are able to provide that service courtesy of AustLII. AustLII is Australia's free online legal database. It publishes all the publicly available decisions of all our courts and tribunals, as well as legislation, over 100 law journals, all our international treaties, and all law reform reports. This month, AustLII turns 20.

Graham Greenleaf is a Professor of Law and Information Systems at UNSW, and he's the co-director of the very popular AustLII.

Graham Greenleaf: We receive over 600,000 page accesses per day, and the only independent rating service for internet access puts AustLII a long way ahead of every other online source of legal information in Australia, whether its commercial, legal publishers or government websites for legal information. AustLII has more than 30% of the whole measurable usage.

Damien Carrick: Of course you are free, it's open access. Who pays for AustLII?

Graham Greenleaf: Well, the principal basis of AustLII's funding is over 250 organisations and individuals that make voluntary contributions each year to AustLII or enter into joint projects with AustLII, which they fund, and that funding adds up on average to around $1 million a year, which is enough for us to just sustain the very heavy-duty equipment that we need and the maintenance and updating of what is now over 700 Australasian databases.

Damien Carrick: And the main contributors are, what, they are universities, they are private law firms? Who gives you the dosh?

Graham Greenleaf: Yes, all of those. Australia's universities have all been very good in their support for AustLII and probably amount to between 25% and 30% of all the funding. The legal profession, counting both legal profession organisations and individual law firms, make up around a similar amount. Then there are various corporate contributors such as a law firm insurer in Victoria who is a very generous contributor to AustLII because they say we are about the best insurance policy they have against small law firms being involved in negligence actions.

Damien Carrick: In other words, if they do their job properly because they get access to the information, they are less likely to cause problems with the insurer.

Graham Greenleaf: Yes, absolutely.

Damien Carrick: Now, it's all about open justice. But there is in some ways a tension, isn't there, between the principle of open justice, access to all the information about what's going on in our courts, and maintaining the privacy of people involved in court cases. And we have this principle of open justice but there is this other competing idea of privacy of individuals involved in court cases. How do you deal with that issue? I know some places like the Family Court actually anonymise their judgements, but more generally, how does AustLII deal with that issue? Is it an issue, and how does AustLII deal with it?

Graham Greenleaf: Yes, it's a complex issue that requires balancing of two important social interests; open justice and privacy. And I'm happy to say it's not just AustLII that has to deal with maintaining that balance, all of our courts and tribunals play a very active role in that as well and, as I might say, so do responsible journalists in deciding what to publish out of information that is readily available on the internet. And it is a complex thing, Damien, where a lot of elements make up a uniquely Australian mix of how we balance these two things. Some of those elements are that while under our principles of open justice, most court decisions of our senior courts and tribunals are published in an identified fashion, and of course published in AustLII in that way. The courts themselves generally decide what categories of decisions should be anonymised, and it's not only the Family Court decisions you mention, but there are other categories of decisions in such areas as immigration, in data protection or privacy law, even in some aspects of administrative law where the courts and tribunals anonymise.

But there's another layer beyond that where the courts and tribunals generally now have internal sets of policies by which they minimise the amount of personal information they make available in their cases, while still identifying the parties, but avoiding providing unnecessary information about addresses or obvious things like tax file numbers that could lead to identity theft, or could more easily lead to individuals named in cases being tracked down, as it were, in a way that is completely unnecessary to open justice.

Damien Carrick: If you type in somebody's name into a Google search, will it come up with a court case which has been published by AustLII?

Graham Greenleaf: Not in Australia it won't, no, not anywhere in relation to AustLII, because our courts and tribunals on their own websites do not allow the web spiders used by search engines to make their cases searchable. And from inception, AustLII has not allowed search engines like Google to make any of its case law searchable. We make the legislation searchable, the law journal articles are searchable, but the case law is not. If people want to search AustLII they have to come to the AustLII website, which is there for the purposes of legal research, and they can't just accidentally find out when they are looking up the name of someone for a class reunion all the court cases that person might have been involved in.

Damien Carrick: Fascinating. But, for instance, if you are wanting to know if you should enter into business with somebody or with a company, you might want to know that information. Very interesting competing public policy issues at play here.

Graham Greenleaf: Yes, there are competing public policies, and as in many things in life it's not a completely cut and dried sort of thing, it's a fairly sophisticated, messy balance that has been reached in Australia, but it's one that seems to satisfy both the individuals concerned in the cases, by and large, and the public interests, the courts and tribunals et cetera.

Damien Carrick: Professor Graham Greenleaf, congratulations and happy birthday to AustLII.

Graham Greenleaf: Thank you very much Damien, I hope we'll be here in another 20 years for a 40th birthday.

Damien Carrick: I think that's a safe bet. Graham Greenleaf, co-director of AustLII.

That's the Law Report for this week. Thanks to producer Anita Barraud and also to technical producer Tim Symons. Don't forget we are tweeting @LawReportRN and @damien_carrick. Damien Carrick with you, talk to you next week with more law.