Changeflow GovPing Courts & Legal Bot Verification Blocks Access to EWCA Civil Case
Routine Notice Added Final

Bot Verification Blocks Access to EWCA Civil Case

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Summary

BAILII displays a bot verification challenge (Anubis proof-of-work) when accessing England & Wales case documents. The security measure aims to protect the server from AI scraping but blocks access to the underlying case content. No substantive legal information from EWCA/Civ/2026/488 is available.

Published by BAILII on bailii.org . Detected, standardized, and enriched by GovPing. Review our methodology and editorial standards .

What changed

The BAILII website now presents a bot verification challenge (Anubis) before allowing access to court case documents. This proof-of-work security measure is designed to deter mass AI scraping but prevents automated retrieval of case content.

Legal professionals and researchers relying on automated case-law retrieval from BAILII will need to use browser-based access or disable JavaScript-blocking extensions for the domain to retrieve case documents.

Archived snapshot

Apr 22, 2026

GovPing 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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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.

Last updated

Classification

Agency
BAILII
Instrument
Notice
Branch
Independent
Legal weight
Non-binding
Stage
Final
Change scope
Minor

Who this affects

Applies to
Legal professionals
Industry sector
5112 Software & Technology 5411 Legal Services
Activity scope
Bot protection Anti-scraping measures
Geographic scope
United Kingdom GB

Taxonomy

Primary area
Cybersecurity
Operational domain
IT Security
Topics
Data Privacy Cybersecurity

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