Bot Protection Page - Criminal Case Access Blocked
Summary
The British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) website has implemented Anubis, a proof-of-work bot protection system, to prevent aggressive AI web scraping. The system uses a Hashcash-style challenge to impose computational costs on mass scrapers while allowing legitimate users through with minimal friction. Users with JavaScript-blocking plugins such as JShelter must disable them to access case content.
What changed
BAILII has deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work-based bot protection mechanism, on its website. The system is designed to deter AI companies from aggressively scraping legal databases by adding computational overhead that becomes significant at scale. Legitimate users typically pass through without intervention, while automated scrapers face a cryptographic challenge.\n\nLegal researchers and practitioners accessing BAILII case documents should disable JavaScript-blocking browser extensions to retrieve case content. No regulatory obligations or compliance requirements are imposed by this technical measure.
Archived snapshot
Apr 17, 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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