Anti-bot Verification Page Blocks Legal Case Access
Summary
BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute) deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot system, to protect its Scotland recent decisions feed against AI scraping. The system requires JavaScript execution and may conflict with privacy extensions like JShelter. The technical measure is described as a placeholder while more sophisticated browser fingerprinting is developed.
About this source
GovPing monitors BAILII Scotland Recent Decisions for new courts & legal regulatory changes. Every update since tracking began is archived, classified, and available as free RSS or email alerts — 36 changes logged to date.
What changed
BAILII implemented Anubis, a proof-of-work verification system, as a protective measure against AI companies aggressively scraping its legal decision database. The system uses a Hashcash-style proof-of-work that adds negligible load for individual users but becomes costly at scale for mass scrapers.
For legal researchers and practitioners accessing Scotland decisions through BAILII, the practical impact is that modern JavaScript must be enabled and privacy extensions such as JShelter must be disabled for the affected domain to retrieve case content.
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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