I discovered today that computers in my building can’t download cases from Austlii!

(Dr Manhattan’s Edit: it’s not an isolated phenomenon. Company or site servers readily identify the kinds of benign or helpful scripts that are there to help you as the kind of internet nasties which are there to steal your credit card information and delete your e-mail Address Book).

Apparently the firewall is now deliberately configured to prevent downloading Word documents from the internet! It’s not just restricted to Austlii: I found I couldn’t download Word documents from other web-locations.

The ‘solution’ is to individually apply for Austlii’s removal from restricted access!

I can’t imagine any justification for prohibiting access to a publicly-available site. Particularly one that is amongst the most popular and widely used in Australian legal circles. And especially when it stops us from accessing the lifeblood of our profession, that relatively minor piece of information so coyly and obscurely termed The Law. And even though we have all used it for many years now.

We can only hope that sanity prevails.