[1][2] Traditionally, legal information was accessible through a law report, usually written by private individuals or groups.
BAILII was set up after a long and hard campaign by various activists including senior members of the Society for Computers & Law, such as then-chairman Neil Cameron, barrister Laurie West-Knights QC, Lord Saville and Lord Justice Brooke, who were concerned about the lack of availability of court judgments to ordinary court users and were inspired by the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) LII.
BAILII has received criticisms due to the restrictions it imposes on its usage: in a Guardian editorial, it was noted that BAILII had "done a wonderful job of making case law freely accessible to lawyers", including "historic and European data that is otherwise very difficult to find."
However, it was also noted that as a small charity the service "struggles to afford to host its 297,000 judgments, and does not allow search engines to index them.
In some instances it is not even clear whether the crown or the judge concerned holds the copyright to the words, and reproducing them on any other site is forbidden.
[8] [better source needed] Former BAILII chairman Henry Brooke defended criticisms, stating that the restrictions on indexing were to ensure that records could be retroactively edited or removed for clerical or legal reasons, such as errors, information that was not authorized to be published, or records that have not been properly anonymized.
He also stated that the restriction on redistribution was to protect its "value-added content", such as "converting it into a suitable format and making efforts to prevent the publication of material that must not be published".