Bot Verification Page for Case Content Access
Summary
BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute) deployed Anubis anti-bot verification using Hashcash-style Proof-of-Work scheme to protect servers against AI scraping. The system adds computational load at scale to deter mass automated access while minimizing impact on legitimate users. Users must enable JavaScript and disable privacy plugins like JShelter to proceed.
What changed
BAILII implemented Anubis, a bot verification system using Hashcash-style Proof-of-Work to prevent AI companies from scraping legal case databases. The system requires users to solve computational puzzles to access content, with the load being negligible for individual requests but significant at mass-scraping scale. The system is presented as an interim solution while more sophisticated headless browser fingerprinting is developed.
Legal professionals and researchers accessing BAILII case databases may need to adjust browser settings (enable JavaScript, disable JShelter or similar plugins) to proceed through verification. The system is designed not to burden legitimate users while making automated bulk scraping economically impractical.
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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