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Routine Notice Added Final

Bot Verification Required for Court Case Database Access

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Summary

BAILII has deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot protection system, to protect its server infrastructure against automated scraping by AI companies. Users must solve a computational challenge using modern JavaScript to access case content. Plugins such as JShelter may interfere with the verification process and should be disabled for the BAILII domain.

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

What changed

BAILII has implemented Anubis, a proof-of-work verification system modelled on Hashcash, to deter mass automated scraping of its legal database by AI companies. The system requires users to execute JavaScript-based computational challenges before accessing case content.

Website users and legal researchers accessing BAILII case databases should ensure their browsers support modern JavaScript and temporarily disable anti-tracking plugins such as JShelter when accessing case content, as these plugins may prevent successful verification and block access.

Archived snapshot

Apr 21, 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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Last updated

Classification

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

Who this affects

Applies to
Legal professionals Researchers
Industry sector
5112 Software & Technology
Activity scope
Legal database access Bot protection
Geographic scope
United Kingdom GB

Taxonomy

Primary area
Judicial Administration
Operational domain
IT Security
Topics
Data Privacy Cybersecurity

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