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Hong Kong Watches CLARITY Act as Section 604 Shields Code From Capital-Flight Trigger HONG KONG — A clause buried inside Washington's draft digital-asset framework has become an unlikely focal point for Asia-Pacific licensing regimes, with regional regulators quietly modelling what happens to engineering talent and protocol capital if the United States moves to criminalise the writing of open-source code.
Charles Hoskinson, founder of the Cardano network, escalated the debate this week by publicly pressing US lawmakers to preserve Section 604 of the proposed CLARITY Act — the carve-out that would block prosecutors and civil litigants from pinning the misuse of neutral software on the developers who wrote it.
Removing the provision, Hoskinson argued, would be the regulatory equivalent of jailing a novelist because a reader committed a crime after closing the book.
The remarks have travelled fast through Asia-Pacific policy circles.
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