Anti-bot Challenge Page Blocks Access to Court Database
Summary
The BAILII Ireland legal database has deployed an anti-bot protection system (Anubis) using proof-of-work technology to prevent AI companies from scraping content. Users attempting to access case documents may encounter a challenge page requiring JavaScript to proceed. The system is described as a temporary measure pending development of more sophisticated bot detection methods.
What changed
BAILII Ireland deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot system, to protect its server infrastructure from AI companies scraping legal case documents. The system uses Hashcash-style proof-of-work that imposes minimal load on individual users but becomes computationally expensive at mass scraping scale. This is presented as a temporary solution while more sophisticated headless browser fingerprinting is developed. Users may encounter access challenges requiring modern JavaScript and disabling certain browser extensions like JShelter.
Affected parties seeking access to Irish court decisions on BAILII should disable JavaScript-blocking plugins for the bailii.org domain to proceed. Legal professionals and researchers relying on automated access should note this technical barrier may require manual verification or adjusted data collection methods.
What to do next
- Monitor for updates if access issues persist
Archived snapshot
Apr 13, 2026GovPing captured this document from the original source. If the source has since changed or been removed, this is the text as it existed at that time.
Making sure you're not a bot!
Loading...
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
Anubis is a compromise. Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash, a proposed proof-of-work scheme for reducing email spam. The idea is that at individual scales the additional load is ignorable, but at mass scraper levels it adds up and makes scraping much more expensive.
Ultimately, this is a placeholder solution so that more time can be spent on fingerprinting and identifying headless browsers (EG: via how they do font rendering) so that the challenge proof of work page doesn't need to be presented to users that are much more likely to be legitimate.
Please note that Anubis requires the use of modern JavaScript features that plugins like JShelter will disable. Please disable JShelter or other such plugins for this domain.
Related changes
Get daily alerts for BAILII Ireland Recent Decisions
Daily digest delivered to your inbox.
Free. Unsubscribe anytime.
About this page
Every important government, regulator, and court update from around the world. One place. Real-time. Free. Our mission
Source document text, dates, docket IDs, and authority are extracted directly from BAILII.
The summary, classification, recommended actions, deadlines, and penalty information are AI-generated from the original text and may contain errors. Always verify against the source document.
Classification
Who this affects
Taxonomy
Browse Categories
Get alerts for this source
We'll email you when BAILII Ireland Recent Decisions publishes new changes.
Subscribed!
Optional. Filters your digest to exactly the updates that matter to you.