Policy on use of documents located on NZLII or AustLII
('NZLII Usage Policy')

1. General principles

(a) AustLII and NZLII are not-for-profit entities 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. As NZLII is part of AustLII their usage policy applies to NZLII.

(b) In order to provide this service, AustLII and NZLII have 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) Neither NZLII or AustLII are a data repository and we do not provide a service for other publishers or systems to obtain documents from NZLIILII 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, NZLII 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) NZLII places particular restrictions upon the ways in which case-law documents on NZLII can be copied and used. AustLII and NZLII specifically restricts, via the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP), all spiders and other automated agents from accessing and copying its case-law. Additionally, AustLII and NZLII blocks automated access to all materials for AI-related uses across its entire collection. AustLII and NZLII 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 NZLII; 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) NZLII may block, rate-limit, or take other technical and legal measures, without notice, against activities that breach or attempt to circumvent this policy or NZLII’s access controls.

2. End Use

(a) Individual end-users of the NZLII 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 is subject to (1)(e) above.

3. Copyright in content on AustLII and NZLII

(a) NZLII is not the copyright owner in the source documents published on NZLII 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, training or similar purposes, excluding AI-related uses.

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

(a) AustLII and NZLII will not act as a data repository or re-supplier of source documents that it has obtained from their original sources, to other publishers 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.

(b) NZLII may, in its discretion, enter into written agreements with particular organisations establishing different conditions of use for NZLII materials that would otherwise be restricted under this policy, subject to terms determined by NZLII. No permission will be granted or implied except by a written agreement signed by NZLII.

5. Provision of source documents by Courts and other data providers

(a) AustLII and NZLII support Courts and other providers of public legal information in supplying the source data for which they are responsible (cases, legislation etc) on the same basis to all publishers, both in relation to (i) ongoing supply, and (ii) maintenance of archival copies of data previously supplied.

(b) AustLII and NZLII will assist Courts or other providers of public legal information in relation to(a)(ii) above if such assistance is requested.

(c) Each Court or other provider of public legal information sets its own policies in relation to such matters as privacy (including access by third party search engines), ‘take down’ or replacement of decisions and republication of data by third parties including copyright policies.

(d) AustLII and NZLII complies with the policies of each Court or other provider of public legal information, and supports efforts to develop standards concerning such policies.

6. Use of NZLII legal materials in AI systems and automated frameworks

(a) NZII’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 NZLII materials for use in automated or AI-enabled systems;

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

(iv) automated or programmatic querying of NZLII 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 NZLII 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 NZLII 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 NZLII 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 NZLII content, whether verbatim or paraphrased.

This policy may be amended at NZLII ’s discretion.

-- JudiEathorneGould - 12 June 2025