Anubis Anti-Scraping Protection Blocks Access to Judgment
Summary
BAILII has implemented Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-scraping protection system, on its England and Wales Court of Appeal Criminal Division judgment pages. The system uses Hashcash-style proof-of-work to deter AI companies and automated scrapers from mass-accessing content. Users must disable JavaScript-blocking plugins such as JShelter to access the protected judgment pages.
What changed
The BAILII website has added Anubis, an anti-bot protection system using proof-of-work technology, to its England and Wales Court of Appeal Criminal Division judgment pages. The protection is designed to prevent mass automated scraping by AI companies while allowing legitimate human users to access content after solving a computational challenge.
Legal professionals, researchers, and other parties attempting to access court judgments through automated means or with JavaScript-blocking extensions will need to temporarily disable such tools. The protection represents a technical access control measure rather than a substantive change to the underlying case law, though it may create temporary barriers for automated legal research systems.
What to do next
- Disable JavaScript-blocking plugins to access BAILII judgments
- Solve proof-of-work challenge to view protected court judgments
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.
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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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