Ex-Goldman Sachs programmer's code theft conviction overturned AGAIN Sergey Aleynikov, the former Goldman Sachs programmer who was charged with stealing code from the firm's high-frequency trading software, has had his conviction overturned a second time. Justice Daniel Conviser of the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan tossed out the conviction in a ruling on Monday, The New York Times …
Indeed.
According to Flash Boys quite a lot of that code was open source to begin with.
It would seem the NYC DA wants to be able to say "See, we did take to court for Goldman Sachs."
No doubt some GS senior employees should have gone to prison.
But they won't.
"Codes you say, codes!? What in God's name is a code and how the sweet Jehoshaphat can youze steal lines from a bank? And what in mah sweet giddy aunt Jessie is a Cumputah? Sir, are you laughin' at me and mah court..."
"Well your honour, it's like this..."
...and so on until acquittal follows from irate judge.
If Aleynikov really did misappropriate some exclusively proprietary code owned by his former employer, that might be a violation of his employment contract with them, or even an unlawful conversion in tort, but it wasn't a crime. The authorities didn't charge him with the crime of larceny for a good reason: the facts would not support the charge. This situation was, and should have remained, a civil matter. You have to wonder whether the US Attorney or the DA would have even involved themselves if the employer hadn't been a really big, influential, fish like Goldman -- I doubt it.
It was breach of copyright and according to the government, that's worse than murder.......
OMG it's PIRACY! It's punishable by hanging or at least by careening.
Btw. who was it again that helped Greece to fake their financial reports so they could enter the Euro zone? Pirates, I say. Pirates...
Nice to read an item that hasn't been "enhanced" by the subs.
The DA in question is the well connected son of a former US Secretary of State.
It is quite possible that young Cyrus has never operated a computing device, given his age and background.
I haven't read Flash Boys (I plan on remedying that), but if much of the code is based on Open Source, material then that could open up a whole new can of worms, with GS in the firing line for potential GPL-type violations.
Some time ago, I was invited to attend a meeting at GS and after some stuffing around I was asked to consider spending more time there in the future. At that point a salesman type suit asked me if I could explain my understanding of the difference between bonds and equities (he can't have been listening to the earlier conversation), I was somewhat taken aback (it was like asking a surgeon if he knew the difference between the heart and the lungs, or a chef, for that matter), so I explained how certain investment banking practices, when used in "creative" ways removed all the apparent risk mitigation factors that attract investors to bonds in the first place, and left them as exposed as equity investors. Fortunately, I had decided earlier in the meeting that I did not wish to spend more time with these guys.
The article says he was acquitted of the "computer-related material" charge (or first convicted and then that conviction was overturned - I haven't gone back to check), and then in his second trial convicted of some charge relating to "scientific material". That, presumably, is the "oddball law" in question.
According to the book, he spent his time at Goldman trying to maintain out of date code in the HFT era. He was leaving to join another company, that would have been a competitor of Goldman's. The code he copied was mostly open-source, but would have been of no practical or commercial use. A large part of why he was leaving was to be able to start a new codebase from scratch - designed for the job. Old cruft would not have been helpful;.
He also says in the book, that GS were happy to use open-source, but didn't contribute their changes back. Perfectly OK, depending on the license - but not really in the spirit of the thing.
"If what Sergey Aleynikov did isn't a crime, then every company that values its intellectual property should be concerned."
Vance needs to understand what the law is. Everything the guy was charged with was a crime. The "problem" was that there was no or insufficient proof that he committed the crimes he was charged with therefore he's innocent. They've already had two goes at him with two different sets of charges, maybe they'll have another go. As I said in another post, big companies seem to keep appealing the law until the get the answer they want. The rest of us can't afford that kind of "justice".
You say
"Vance needs to understand what the law is."
Vance knows exactly what the law is. What the law is is irrelevant. Vance wants a conviction and he uses his courtroom skills to get the jury, who do not know the law, to agree on a verdict of guilty.
That is the way the legal system works
Vance wants a conviction and he uses his courtroom skills to get the jury, who do not know the law, to agree on a verdict of guilty.
Correct. It's the adversarial system used in the US: prosecutors aim to get a conviction by any legal means available. That's why, for example, they're perfectly happy to take confessions extracted by police using lies, threats, and oppressive conditions such as keeping suspects in interrogation for long periods of time.
(No doubt a great many are also obtained by outright illegal means - violence and other violations of civil rights - which many a prosecutor has winked at. But that's another problem. The issue here is that in the US prosecutors are employed and incentivized specifically to convict people, not to seek justice.)
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