Anti-Bot Verification Page Blocking Access to Legal Case
Summary
BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute) deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot protection system, to prevent AI companies from aggressively scraping the website. The system uses a Hashcash-style proof-of-work scheme that adds minimal load for individual users but significantly increases the cost of mass scraping. The protection page notes that JavaScript-blocking plugins such as JShelter may interfere with the verification process.
About this source
GovPing monitors BAILII England & Wales Recent Decisions for new courts & legal regulatory changes. Every update since tracking began is archived, classified, and available as free RSS or email alerts — 201 changes logged to date.
What changed
BAILII implemented an anti-bot verification system that blocks access to legal case documents. The system presents a proof-of-work challenge (Anubis) to visitors to distinguish between legitimate users and automated scrapers. The page explains this is a temporary measure while more sophisticated fingerprinting techniques for detecting headless browsers are developed.
Legal professionals and researchers attempting to access case law through automated tools may experience access barriers. Users must disable JavaScript-blocking browser extensions for the domain to proceed. The system is designed to be unobtrusive for individual legitimate users while making large-scale scraping economically impractical.
Archived snapshot
Apr 22, 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.
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.
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