Thursday, August 9, 2012

Double Jeopardy? Ex-Goldman programmer charged, again, over code theft



If you don’t succeed the first time, try, try again.  A former Goldman Sachs computer programmer who was cleared in February of federal charges of stealing high-frequency trading code has been hit with new charges arising from the same activity, Reuters told us.

Sergey Aleynikov, the former programmer, now faces charges brought by the office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, a new twist in a case first filed by U.S. federal prosecutors in July 2009.

Federal prosecutors had accused Aleynikov of copying and removing trading code from Goldman in 2009 as he was preparing to take a new job at Teza Technologies LLC, a high-frequency trading start-up firm in Chicago.

In throwing out Aleynikov's conviction, the 2nd Circuit had ruled that the taking of source code was not a crime under a federal law that makes it illegal to steal trade secrets, and that the code did not qualify as stolen goods under another federal law.  Vance, however, is trying to prosecute Aleynikov under New York state law, and that could raise double jeopardy concerns, according to Eugene Cerruti, a professor at New York Law School who has been a federal prosecutor and public defender…

http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/08/09/idINL2E8J9AT020120809

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