Anti-bot Protection Page Blocks Content Access on Legal Database
Summary
BAILII has implemented Anubis, a Proof-of-Work anti-bot protection system, on its website to prevent AI companies and mass scrapers from overwhelming servers. The system uses Hashcash-style challenges to make automated scraping computationally expensive while imposing minimal impact on individual legitimate users. Users with JavaScript-disabling plugins like JShelter may need to whitelist the domain.
What changed
BAILII has added Anubis, a Proof-of-Work-based anti-bot system, to protect its legal database from aggressive AI web scraping. The system presents computational challenges to automated clients while remaining transparent to individual users. The implementation uses Hashcash-style proof-of-work to increase the cost of mass scraping operations. Legitimate users with browser extensions like JShelter that disable JavaScript features may be blocked and will need to whitelist the domain. This is a technical access control measure implemented by the legal database operator, not a regulatory or judicial action. No compliance obligations are imposed on any regulated entity.
For users and researchers accessing BAILII, the primary implication is potential access disruption if using automated tools or JavaScript-blocking software. No regulatory reporting, disclosure, or compliance actions are required from any industry sector. The document provides no legal obligations, penalties, or enforcement mechanisms—it is purely an informational notice about a website's technical protection layer.
What to do next
- Monitor for updates to bot protection policy
- Disable JavaScript-blocking plugins if unable to access content
Archived snapshot
Apr 15, 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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