Anti-Bot Protection Placeholder for Scottish Case 2026scall44
Summary
BAILII deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot protection system, on its Scottish case database. The system aims to reduce automated scraping by AI companies while maintaining access for legitimate users. The protection requires JavaScript and may conflict with browser privacy extensions like JShelter.
What changed
BAILII added Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot protection system, to its website infrastructure. The system uses Hashcash-style computational challenges to deter mass scraping by AI companies while adding minimal burden for individual users. The page notes this is a temporary solution pending development of more sophisticated headless browser fingerprinting.\n\nLegal researchers and practitioners accessing Scottish case law through BAILII should ensure their browsers support modern JavaScript and temporarily disable privacy extensions that block script execution. The change affects all BAILII content but does not alter the substantive legal content of case documents.
What to do next
- Disable JShelter or similar plugins before accessing BAILII Scottish cases
- Enable JavaScript in browser for BAILII access
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!
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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.
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Source document text, dates, docket IDs, and authority are extracted directly from BAILII.
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