From Bloomberg: Sergey Aleynikov, the former Goldman Sachs computer programmer found guilty of espionage for stealing the firm’s code for high-frequency trading, had his conviction overturned by a federal appeals court in New York. In a one-page order yesterday, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan told the lower court to enter a judgment of acquittal, saying an opinion will follow later.
Aleynikov was convicted by a Manhattan federal jury in December 2010 of violating the Economic Espionage Act and the Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property Act. He was sentenced to more than eight years in prison last March. On his last day of work at New York-based Goldman Sachs in June 2009, Aleynikov uploaded hundreds of thousands of lines of source code from the firm’s high-frequency trading system, prosecutors said. He circumvented Goldman Sachs’s security, sent the code to a server in Germany, compressed and encrypted it, and took it with him to a meeting with new employers in Chicago, the U.S. said. Prosecutors argued Aleynikov wanted it as a “cheat sheet” to start a trading system at his new job….
During oral arguments yesterday, the three-judge appeals panel criticized the government’s application of the Economic Espionage Act to Aleynikov’s actions, asking the prosecutor how the crime occurred and how it affected commerce.
The appeals court judges -- Dennis Jacobs, 67, Guido Calabresi, 79, and Rosemary Pooler, 73 -- also asked if the taking of Goldman Sachs’s trading code was comparable to taking copyrighted material or bringing an employee manual to a new job…
Read all about it at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-17/ex-goldman-programmer-s-conviction-overturned-on-appeal.html
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