Changeflow GovPing Courts & Legal Bot Verification Page Blocks Access to EUECJ Case
Routine Notice Added Final

Bot Verification Page Blocks Access to EUECJ Case

Favicon for www.bailii.org BAILII Europe Recent Decisions
Detected
Email

Summary

BAILII (British and Irish Legal Information Institute) returned a bot verification page instead of the expected EUECJ case T58924. The website has implemented Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-scraping protection system, to prevent AI companies from aggressively harvesting content. Users must complete a proof-of-work challenge to access the actual legal document.

What changed

The BAILII Europe Recent Decisions database returned a bot verification challenge page rather than the requested EUECJ/2026/T58924 case. The Anubis system implements Hashcash-style proof-of-work to deter automated scraping by AI companies. Legitimate users must execute JavaScript-based proof-of-work computations before accessing legal content.\n\nFor compliance officers and legal professionals seeking case law, this means additional friction when retrieving EU court decisions. Users with privacy-focused browser extensions like JShelter will need to temporarily whitelist the domain. The system is described as a temporary measure while more sophisticated fingerprinting of headless browsers is developed.

What to do next

  1. Complete proof-of-work challenge to access content
  2. Disable JShelter or similar JavaScript-blocking extensions for this domain

Archived snapshot

Apr 16, 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!

Loading...

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.

Get daily alerts for BAILII Europe Recent Decisions

Daily digest delivered to your inbox.

Free. Unsubscribe anytime.

About this page

What is GovPing?

Every important government, regulator, and court update from around the world. One place. Real-time. Free. Our mission

What's from the agency?

Source document text, dates, docket IDs, and authority are extracted directly from GP.

What's AI-generated?

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
GP
Instrument
Notice
Legal weight
Non-binding
Stage
Final
Change scope
Minor

Who this affects

Applies to
Legal professionals Researchers Investors
Industry sector
5112 Software & Technology
Activity scope
Web scraping prevention Legal database access Proof-of-work authentication
Geographic scope
European Union EU

Taxonomy

Primary area
Cybersecurity
Operational domain
IT Security
Topics
Data Privacy Intellectual Property

Get alerts for this source

We'll email you when BAILII Europe Recent Decisions publishes new changes.

Free. Unsubscribe anytime.

You're subscribed!