BAILII Bot Verification Blocks EUECJ Case Access
Summary
BAILII deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work verification system, to block AI and mass-scraping access to its legal databases. Users attempting to access EUECJ case documents may encounter a bot-verification challenge before reaching content. The system adds negligible load for individual legitimate users but is designed to make large-scale scraping economically prohibitive.
“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.”
What changed
BAILII added Anubis, a Hashcash-style proof-of-work system, to its EU court case database as a bot-detection and anti-scraping measure. The system presents a computational challenge to visitors suspected of being automated scrapers, while attempting to remain transparent to legitimate human users. No regulatory obligation or compliance requirement is imposed by this technical change.
Legal professionals, researchers, and automated systems that previously accessed EUECJ case content via scraping or bulk downloads will need to adapt their workflows. Individual users with standard browsers should experience minimal disruption; firms relying on large-scale automated data collection from BAILII will face increased technical barriers.
Archived snapshot
Apr 21, 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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