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copied!<p>This isn't reliable. To the best of my knowledge, the only way to get geographic location from an IP is to look up the DNS or whois records and see what geographic location they give, if any. But there's no assurance that that's the actual geographical location of a given user. For a home user it's going to show the location of the ISP, not the user. For example I just tried that site you linked to and it said I was in Ann Arbor, Michigan, US, which is close but I am really in Monroe, Michigan, 40 miles away. For someone at a business location, it's a location entered by the business, which is often their headquarters or a network center, not necessarily the work location of the individual person. That can result in wildly inaccurate locations.</p> <p>If you're talking contractual issues, I don't think a "maybe probably this is what state they're in" will work. It occurs to me that even if you had a method that was 100% accurate, it could at best tell you where the user is at that moment, which is not necessarily where they live or where their business is. What if someone lives near a state boundary, and he connects to your web site while eating lunch at a wifi hot spot across the state line?</p> <p>I think you'd be better off to just ask the user to tell you where they live or where their office is located. You can save their answer in your own database. Last I checked Australia only had six states -- maybe you also need to allow the territories, whatever -- so it shouldn't be tough for someone to select the right one from a list. That doesn't seem like a hard question.</p>

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