You have to consider that accepting SAFE for what governments consider illegal services would in fact constitute a greater risk for “commercial” SafeNet content providers.
If you’re (according to laws of most countries) illegally seeding copyrighted content, you may be able to get away with it (cease & desist, warnings, etc.).
If you’re selling it (i.e. a gated MaidSafe site), then you’re running a high risk of being sued. If they ever find you. They probably won’t, but it just doesn’t seem like a good risk/reward ratio. Because anyone from the rest of the world can download the content and compete for the same market using a lower price without the same risk of getting caught, it would be tough to actually make money.
Without any barrier to entry, the cost of keeping the site up to date is the cost of distributing content and the lowest price possible (well the lowest price possible is $0, if there be a Safecorn site that’s public and community maintained and everything’s free).
I commented on that in one of earlier Popcorn related posts: Popcorn performs “ordered fetching” of video/audio chunks so you get the content in the right order. With this optimization (which has been available in the commercial edition of Vuze for years now) you can start watching almost instantly - there’s no need to download the file first.
MaidSafe may be faster and maybe there are embedded browser players that could be used to the same effect, but it’s premature to say that MaidSafe would have advantage here.
One of main advantages is that people (aka farmers) have a financial incentive to keep the stuff online, so the availability of content should be much better on MaidSafe.
MaidSafe to some extent splits Bitorrent’s “initial seeder” role into the role of the PUT-er and farmer. In this world as a PUT-er to a gated paid or public (free or paid) site you’d have the same risk (but better anonymity) as the initial Bittorrent seeder. Farmers would be safer, because they wouldn’t know what they’re storing, but since they’re getting paid, who knows.
If one sees a research estimate that 13.8% of SafeNet earnings come from (what’s considered) illegal downloads, what does that mean for him as a farmer?
I think users will come to SafeNet because content will be more readily available. Many don’t seem particularly concerned about legal risks, but for those who do MaidSafe would be a better choice.