With all respect (and I do have a lot of respect for what you’re doing for TF and how you communicate), but either you really do not understand, or you just don’t want to understand the topic at hand here.
You are an engineer, and you know a thousand things I cannot begin to understand. But when it comes to legal stuff, I think I have much more experience then you have, so accept that as an added value for the community.
We were discussing connecting Third Parties to a service provided by an ISP. This was suggested by Drew as part of the solution he offered to connect local communities.
This is completely different from the use of a Internet connection by the primary contract party, i.e. the Farmer.
If you operate against their ToS, the ISP has the legal and law supported right to disconnect you, and even claim damages. So, you can go to court, but the ISP is in his legal right to terminate the contract if you don’t adhere to their ToS. The Law will not allow this, unless what has been written in the ToS compromises other standing Laws (so, you cannot agree in the ToS that you are allowed to shoot people for example).
So, not complying with a ToS eventually is outside the law as the ISP can invoke the law to have its ToS enforced, or can legally (by law) disconnect a subscriber without the subscriber having the legal right to claim damages.
You are comparing apples with oranges here.
Using your consumer connection to work from home, is not an infringement of any articles about third party use.
It is not what you do, but who is doing it…
However, as I indicated, an interesting case arises if the consumer (or business) connection is used to execute workloads that actually are under the full control of third parties .
The contract partner of the ISP (the farmer) actually doesn’t even know who is executing workloads on their nodes, let alone what these workloads and associated data entail.
So, in this case an ISP could take the point of view that, though no third party is physically connected to the connection of the contract partner, the actual workloads are actually on behalf of a third party.
It’s just hosting, another activity which is excluded as permitted use by most ISP’s.
Questions surrounding this topic have been raised before on the diverse forums of TF. Farmers sometimes have asked ‘ am I responsible for the workloads / data stored on a node if/when these workloads / data are against the law ’. I have never seen a satisfying answer to this.
Believe me, when TF scales up, then ISP’s will take the point of view that this is NOT permitted use. Believe me also when I say I want to be wrong here and that TF is too small now to be on any radar screen (so now is the time to discuss this).
And again, if there are people actually doing this, then this doesn’t mean that they are compliant.
Again, technical possibility does not imply legal feasibility.
The current crackdown of the SEC on crypto is a good example. Yes, all these crypto’s are technically possible, but at the end they are just securities and will be treated as such by law. The rest of the World will follow.
Call me arrogant, but I predicted that this would happen already 10 years ago, and therefore I never advised anyone to invest in crypto. At the end, most of it is just against the intention of current laws, however ‘the people’ want this to be different.
Look at the disaster these days with FTX. The enormous amount of money lost by retail investors like most of you here.
To avoid loses for unqualified investors (you all) is exactly the reason why securities are so heavily regulated. All the mistakes currently made by the crypto industry, were made decades ago by the then established financial institutes, and the Governments stopped the the damage by regulation (which has surpassed its goals in many ways, but that is another discussion).
Believe me, I know about all this as I was co-founder of an important fintech company in The Netherlands which we managed to make happen only because of close collaboration with the Ministry of Finance and tons of $$ spend on lawyers before we launched.
The intelligent reader might observe that we actually invested in TF (crypto). Why? Well, because at that time TF coined (as a first?) the term Utility Token . Not a security, but a means doing micro transactions on a distributed network.
Note how TF still stresses that the TFT is NOT a speculative instrument, but a software token to exchange value within a closed eco-system. Regarding content storage things where also differently presented (interpreted by us?) back then as is the case now.
It was all still a new and a grey area, but convincing enough for us to go ahead 5 years ago.
But I digress… the best way to make sure (and show me that I’m totally wrong) is to call your ISP and check if what you are doing (or plan to do) is compliant with their ToS.
If you don’t want to do that, then you are afraid for the answer.
Again, this issue is a real issue in the countries where I live / have lived, further amplified by the fact that the ISP’s are state owned. But rolling out the TF proposition in a practical way in Third World countries was the topic of this thread.
And my investors do care for the ‘doing good’ aspect of this project. They are even OK to loose their money WHEN the project has created value for the less served.
What they don’t like however is for their investments to just disappear in thin air or wasted. Not because they don’t want to loose money, but because that money could have been in invested other projects for good !
Lastly, as I advise people to invest (or not) in certain propositions, then if a project relies on a subjective interpretation, the bending or the braking of law (direct or indirect), then it means the project has a legal exposure (justified or not).
If I do not inform the investors about this exposure, then MY head will come off.
Hence, my opinions and questions reflect this. Remarks about possible future investments are about concerns from the investors who trust me, as they don’t have the (technical) knowledge to asses these type of projects.
You forgot to sum up all the disrespectful words which were thrown towards me recently. You seem to be heavily biased towards your co-engineers regarding this (and you are not the only one) unfortunately.
I like this project as I know some key persons in this project already for over 20 years. Hence, I try to see if I can make this project more investor friendly (a clear answer is enough sometimes), so that I could convince certain people for the benefit of all.
So far I failed miserably, but this was never due to the questions I asked, but always due to the answers I received.