Bot Protection Placeholder Page Blocking Case Content Access
Summary
The BAILII website is displaying a bot protection placeholder page instead of case content. The page explains that Anubis, a proof-of-work system, is being used to prevent AI companies from scraping the legal database. Users must complete the JavaScript challenge to access the underlying case.
What changed
This is not a court decision but a bot protection placeholder page from BAILII. The page uses Anubis, a Hashcash-style proof-of-work system, to prevent automated scraping by AI companies. The system adds computational load for mass scrapers while remaining negligible for individual users.
Legal researchers and practitioners relying on automated access to UK case law may face increased friction. The placeholder page notes that longer-term solutions involving fingerprinting of headless browsers are under development to reduce user friction.
Archived snapshot
Apr 18, 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.
Related changes
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Source document text, dates, docket IDs, and authority are extracted directly from BAILII.
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