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by meheleventyone 1692 days ago
Then the author/publisher is the legal entity? The code didn’t just publish itself!
3 comments

The author/publisher of the smart contract is not the counterparty to the transaction or the source of funds; publishing their information, even assuming it's available, wouldn't satisfy the requirements.

6050l should be repealed altogether, not extended to "digital assets". It was wrong when it was first passed and it hasn't gotten any better since.

Code is speech.

Edit - To expand this thought: If I exercise my freedom of speech by writing a smart contract and publish the code, how can I be liable if someone else uses that code on an actual blockchain?

Speech still has liability for example libel. But in this case I would agree that the person that published the code on the blockchain has liability. Which is why I included both occurrences in my post.
The author/publisher might be anonymous. Also, the code could publish itself - one of the opcodes in the Ethereum VM is "create contract".
The code has still been authored to use that op code. Even if you were using a genetic algorithm or similar to generate contracts and some happened to be useful the authorship is still with the author of the original program. Anonymity protects you from having to defend liability not from actually being liable and obviously in the case of crypto has been defeated in the past.