The questions asked first.
Answered here rather than in a meeting, and answered in the form the objection actually takes, including the ones that argue against us.
Isn't this what legal web-capture vendors already do?
They preserve pages a human investigator visits: outward, after the fact, with an affidavit on the capture. Nobody captures the machine traffic arriving at your content: the crawler visits, the claimed agents, the terms in force at the moment they were ignored. The evidentiary form is proven; the direction is new. That is validation, not competition.
Cloudflare already sees all of this traffic.
Seeing is not signing. The blocking layer's logs are private telemetry: they live in someone else's dashboard, they are not signed at capture, and they are not yours to hand to a court. Its business is blocking and metering, and its word about your traffic is still somebody's word. The evidence layer exists precisely because telemetry does not travel.
robots.txt is legally just a sign, not a barrier.
Correct, and the product does not pretend otherwise. A record of a reservation being ignored feeds contract and terms claims, damages, licensing negotiations and regulatory processes, not circumvention claims. Precision about what a record supports is part of the product, because overclaiming is how evidence gets discredited.
You run the capture node yourself. Isn't the record self-serving?
The record is signed by the party who captured it, and that is stated in the record, not hidden. What the format adds is everything that makes self-serving hard: signing at the moment of capture, a chain that makes quiet edits visible, pinned digests of content and terms, an independent time source, and a verifier the other side runs without asking anyone. The attack moves from “this could have been staged” to the reliability of a published, open system.
Will a court accept it?
The record is shaped for the forms courts already accept: content digests, timestamps, an open process description, and a certification by a qualified person: the pattern existing digital-evidence practice runs on. In the EU, records can carry a qualified-timestamp countersignature, the form that carries legal presumption. There is no case law on this class of record yet, in either direction; we treat that as a fact to state, not a detail to hide.
Who are you, and why would anyone rely on you?
Nobody needs to. That is the design decision the whole product follows from. We build the instrument and publish the format; you run the capture, you hold the key, your expert certifies the record, and any party verifies it without us. An evidence vendor asks to be believed. An instrument maker only asks to be examined.
Our data comes from licensed vendors under contract. Why would we need this?
You may not. Where an institutional trust layer already stands between source and consumer, an exchange, a clearing house, a registry, a licensed vendor with a contract that vouches for the feed, rely on it; that is what it is for. LENTRA exists for the data that crosses without one: the open web read by machines, content taken by crawlers, model outputs, signals passed between parties who share no institution. The boundary of the product is institutional, not technical, and being precise about it is why the rest of this page can be believed.
A large player will add this in a sprint.
They will add the fields. They will not add the position: every large player in this traffic is a party to it, blocking it, selling it, or crawling it, and a record signed by an interested party inherits that interest. The instrument's value is that it belongs to whoever runs it and verifies against no one. Neutrality is not a feature you add in a sprint; it is a business you choose instead of a bigger one.
What happens if you disappear?
Every record already issued stays verifiable: the format is open, the keys are published by whoever signed, the verifier runs without us. Evidence does not die with its toolmaker. That was the intent from the first release.
Does a record prove infringement?
No, and it is important to be precise. A record proves what was observed at the moment of capture: this request, from this network, claiming this agent, took this content while these terms were served. Intent, liability and outcome remain with counsel and the court. A chain of custody, not a verdict. Anyone claiming more than that is selling something else.