Changeflow GovPing Courts & Legal Bot Protection Placeholder Page Blocking Case C...
Routine Notice Added Final

Bot Protection Placeholder Page Blocking Case Content Access

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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.

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

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, 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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What's from the agency?

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
Legal weight
Non-binding
Stage
Final
Change scope
Minor

Who this affects

Applies to
Legal professionals
Industry sector
5411 Legal Services
Activity scope
Legal database access Bot protection
Geographic scope
United Kingdom GB

Taxonomy

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

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