Thank you for your answers but, on point A, either it is not interesting, financially (not enough savings) for the user or not interesting at all for those allowing their hard drives to be used. Can't have it both ways. Most likely ANY way.
Your last sentence seems to indicate you've made up your mind or are heavily leaning towards a certain conclusion. It's fine to be skeptical; at the end of the day, for anything to truly take off there are folks will need to "see it to believe it."
As for the illegal content, the bolded statement just makes no sense at all, sorry. Illegal content will be stored and Law Enforcement will indeed pursue it, whether the storee has knowledge of what it is in their hard drives or not. And if what is there is illegal, they will be held responsible, one way or another, regardless of the level of encryption.
Of course LEOs will pursue folks who do things illegally anywhere. That's their rightful job. Folks who
knowingly upload illegal content and share the decryption keys can certainly be liable. Folks who knowingly advertise access to illegal content could also be in hot water depending on jurisdiction.
Farmers receive encrypted chunks from the network, in an automatic fashion. Farmers can't tell chunks apart or piece them together as (a) it's highly unlikely they'd have all the requisite chunks to do so and (b) they may not know how the chunks were encrypted and (c) they wouldn't have the keys to decrypt any content. DriveShare clients will also ultimately prune any chunks that aren't being paid for, as a farmer would only want to store chunks that were economical for them.
So if a LEO nabs someone distributing illegal stuff, that person can no longer pay to keep their content on the network and it would be automatically purged from farmers' drives.
Is there a legal precedent you are basing your last statement on? Are you thinking about a certain legal jurisdiction?
Tor relays, for example, may see all kinds of content, however the Tor Project FAQ indicates that no one has ever been sued or prosecuted in the US for running a Tor relay. The same FAQ indicates that the Tor folks believe running a node is completely legal under US law. One of Tor's active sponsors (2014) is the US Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. I highly doubt the Department of State would fund a project where running a relay would put you in legal hot water.
On another matter, I read now you are selling your network (or leasing its use to be more proper), to others. Such as GEMS. What network is that? You don't have storees as of now to be leasing at all? Or am I missing something here?
Where did you read this? I think you may be thinking of folks who want to integrate with Storj. The MetaDisk API is one way folks will be able to interact with the Storj network and some projects are intending to make use of that API. No "selling" or "leasing" involved.