Judge Dismisses Second Conviction of Ex-Goldman Sachs Coder

Posted by samzenpus on Tuesday July 7, 2015 @12:13AM from the get-out-of-jail dept.

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.

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Michael Lewis's Vanity Fair article by DavidHumus · 2015-07-07 02:02 · Score: 5, Informative

This article - http://www.vanityfair.com/news... - by Michael Lewis, makes the case look like extreme over-reach by our corporate overlords.
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.
The double-jeopardy bypass is also astoundingly corrupt. Not so astounding is the arrogance by which Goldman takes advantage of open-source while ignoring the rules around it.