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Judge Dismisses Second Conviction of Ex-Goldman Sachs Coder
itwbennett writes: Back in May, former Goldman Sachs programmer Sergey Aleynikov was convicted by a jury for stealing 32MB of code for Goldman's high-frequency trading system, code that Aleynikov maintained he copied for intellectual pursuits and was, in fact, open-source. On Monday, Judge Daniel P. Conviser of New York's State Supreme Court dismissed the conviction, saying that Aleynikov acted wrongfully by taking the code, but his actions did not meet the standard under the law in which he was charged. "The evidence did not prove he intended to appropriate all or a major portion of the code's economic value," Conviser wrote.
I see they address the Double Jeopardy laws, saying "New York state prosecutors then took up his case, charging him in August 2013 under different laws but for the same actions, avoiding a conflict with the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment protection against being tried twice for the same crime." Now as far as I know, there is a bit more to Double Jeopardy than just them being different laws; doesn't a new prosecution require different evidence as well to be a valid prosecution for the same action? Does anyoe know how different the charges are this time?
You need to read "Flash Boys" by Michael Lewis to get the full story. The programmer made routine backups of the modifications he made to open source files for release back into the community. Something that Goldman Sach wasn't doing because they were routinely stripping out the GPL license headers and claiming ALL CODE as proprietary. They called the FBI on this guy to prevent him from working for someone else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Boys
I've had similar happen to me. When I was let go they did not make me sign a non-compete, but when I was in talks with another company that was a possible competitor to them, they claimed (wrongly) that I had possession of their intellectual property and called in the lawyers demanding that I give it back. I didn't have any, so I was unable to do so. But then reading more carefully, what they were saying is that they gave me education on my particular area of expertise which I had been doing for 6 years before they hired me specifically for that knowledge and now they are claiming all of my knowledge in that area and claiming that I cannot work for a competitor because all of the knowledge I have belongs to them merely because they augmented it in some small way.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Not to mention that the code that Aleynikov allegedly stole is worthless without a substantial investment in supporting code and trading infrastructure to take advantage of it, not that the higher-ups at a place like Goldman necessarily understand this.
Worthless if you are trying to build your own HFT system perhaps. But not so worthless if you can reverse engineer critical parts of the code and demonstrate that its purpose is to front-run other people's trades rather than just being really fast. If you can show this, you can make a very good living testfying in civil court cases on behalf of clients that got screwed by Goldman Sachs.
Have gnu, will travel.