It's very clear that Goldman is trying to punish him for leaving, while sending a message to their other programmers that if they leave, their lives will be ruined. Even if this guy ultimately wins the state trial, he will never get back the years he has spent fighting it. Goldman has already won, and in this case that is appalling.
No, it's very clear what he did was wrong. He works in an industry that does not allow you to email code home or copy it off of company computers. Goldman might be a little different, but where I've worked, this was definitely a no, no, and you could easily be fired for doing it.
According to the original article, Goldman was actually violating the license terms of the open source software it had modified by not releasing it. Further, while you and I may have our opinions, a judge found Goldman's actions to be so egregious that he ordered them to pay the defense costs for someone accused of stealing from them. That is exceedingly rare, and wouldn't have happened if there were any doubts about either Goldman's conduct or the intentions of the programmer.
Goldman was actually violating the license terms of the open source software it had modified by not releasing it.
I down-voted you because people keep saying that and it is false.
The Vanity Fair article uses the qualifier "possibly" when talking about GS violating the licenses and that's because none of the major license families (BSD, GPL, MPL, etc) have a requirement to release modifications if the whole is not released outside the organization that made them. The Vanity Fair article does not say that the code was ever distributed out of Goldman.
And none of them have that requirement because distribution inside of an organization does not count as a distribution for the purpose of copyright law. (Though if you let people carry it out of the organization, that's a different story.)
That was a point in the original Vanity Fair article that really caught my attention because it seemed very wrong the way it was stated. None of us know all the details but--based on what was written in that article--it sure doesn't sound like a license violation.
I think I see your point, but I wonder... do GS distribute code to their employees? To partner organizations? If so, what are the terms of that distribution? If they are anything other than the original license requires, that's a violation.
From the Vanity Fair article, it sounds like Goldman is in fact violating the terms of the license, but not in the way you're describing. (I.e., not by refusing to release changes.)
According to the article Goldman would routinely strip off the license/copyright from off of the open source code file and replace it with their own copyright. And that is a violation of many open source licenses.
Whoever modified the copyright headers then redistributes the files internally to other programmers and systems. You cannot modify a copyright to your liking and redistribute the work.
You can use open source code without giving up your modifications as long as you don't distribute it. Even if a GPL program is modified by GS and runs on their mainframes, GS is not required to release the source code.
You only need to release the source if you're distributing the modified code, which GS obviously would never do...
> a judge found Goldman's actions to be so egregious that he ordered them to pay the defense costs for someone accused of stealing from them. That is exceedingly rare,
No, GS will have to pay because the defendant was an officer at GS.
> Further, while you and I may have our opinions, a judge found Goldman's actions to be so egregious that he ordered them to pay the defense costs for someone accused of stealing from them. That is exceedingly rare, and wouldn't have happened if there were any doubts about either Goldman's conduct or the intentions of the programmer.
I don't think this is at all what happened. I think a judge ruled that he was a director at the company and therefor the company had to cover any legal costs he incured due to being a director of the company.
As far as I can tell, Goldman's actions had nothing to do with them paying his legal bills.
Any Russian programmer consider any administrativelimitation stupid, amd has the most of the code carved in his wetware. GS and other bozos can try to sue you for keeping the code in your brain, since you obviously taking our brain home. Or do American programmistas leave their brain in the office to comply?
Oh please. If you're Russian, you and I both know that bureaucracy and administrative detail (especially in terms of printed contracts) is well and alive in Russia. Stop being obtuse.
You're conflating the ideas of right and wrong, of law, and of company policy. If something is against policy, that doesn't make it illegal. If something is illegal, that doesn't make it wrong.
He works in an industry that does not allow you to email
code home or copy it off of company computers.
If you read through some of the subpoena petitions in the docket[1] such as [2] you'll find that the defense was asking for documentation of conversations indicating that it was a normal thing for him to take work home with him, and his supervisors were aware of it. Since most of the evidence is under seal (as some of it contains trade-secret information), it's hard to say if he found the evidence that he needed. But it does look like it he's at least claiming that it wasn't unusual for him to take his work home with him.
For example:
The defense will demonstrate at trial that Aleynikov
regularly transferred files offsite and to a local
directory on hosts at Goldman’s development network so
that he would be able to continue working productively in
case of a network outage at Goldman to servers hosting
repositories with platform source code. The records
requested in Item 21 will demonstrate that shortly before
Aleynikov left Goldman, there was an outage that made
access to source code unavailable at least for several
hours that impacted developers’ productivity. This
information will aid the defense in demonstrating that
Aleynikov did not have the specific intent necessary to
commit the crimes with which he was been charged.
Well its a bit of both. Goldman claimed at trial that the code uploaded could be used to manipulate the markets. If a python erlang bridge can be used to do that it is certainly a new one on me. So what he did was wrong. And Goldman was trying to send a message to people leaving. At the time people were leaving their HFT group and they wanted to do anything possible to stem that.
At best this should have been a civil lawsuit. The public almost certainly has no interest in what happened.
Yes he did something wrong and deserved to be fired (if he was still working there), but he definitely doesn't deserve to be facing these ludicrous trumped up charges.
Goldman Sachs have come out of this as the bad guy, throwing their massive legal resources against a single individual.
How is that clear? I haven't followed the case, but it seems as though he copied important intellectual property (HFT code) when he left the firm. I'm sure if a developer at Apple or Microsoft downloaded the Windows or OS X kernel code when they left that they would face charges of some kind as well.
There was a really well-written feature on the case. As I recall, he used and modified open source code in his system. He tried to push his changes upstream, but ran into political pressure from inside of Goldman, so he tried to make a personal copy of the libraries he modified.
You can certainly make the case that Goldman paid for that code, and if they didn't want it pushed upstream that's their prerogative, but it's a very different thing to sell trade secrets to a competitor (how the mass media has reported the case) and to make a backup of an open-source library you modified at work.
If all the changes were only his idea, this may be a reasonable assertion, but at large firms like goldman, the modifications he was making to code very, very likely came from insight from other team members.
If he incorporated other's insight in to his open source code by adding more code, I would view his actions in an extremely negative light.
Not humour, fact. You think billions of dollars a day in transactions are going to be entrusted to a single person writing code? Every single line, algorithm, and bracket is going to be examined by a dozen people over and over.
When a single bug can do a billion dollars in damage or bankrupt you, nothing is left to chance...
According to it, everything he copied was non-proprietary. Almost all of it was open source stuff.
That doesn't make any sense. If the code truly were FOSS, why on earth would he copy it from his employer when he could eliminate legal risk by downloading it off the open internet? We know he's not stupid.
He had made changes/improvements to various FOSS projects he was using at Goldman that he wanted to submit as patches upstream but his bosses wouldn't let him. He figured that since he was leaving he might as well take the FOSS code he had modified with him so he could submit patches later. The legality of this maneuver is tenuous at best, as others in this thread have noted, but in my opinion probably doesn't merit years of hounding prosecution and criminal charges.
Okay. That's interesting. I guess it could be true. Or it could also be a very creative and barely plausible explanation that happens to fit the provable facts of the case. It certainly requires us to accept an astonishing degree of naïveté in an otherwise very smart guy.
Not according to Goldman Sachs:
"While some of those files included open source software, the Court determined that 'a substantially greater number of the uploaded files contained proprietary code.'"
That is essentially correct. However this fight is about more than just him. Essentially he took open source that he modified while at Goldman (Which Goldman prohibited him from releasing *fixed). So while his life is ruined (Although he is still better of then 99.99% of people out there) there is a mighty precedent in the works here: employees can't go to jail for legally following license.
> (Which Goldman illegally prohibited him from releasing, while license explicitly said if you modify it for commercial product you must make your contributions public)
I don't know the exact details of the case, but just to clarify: under the GPL, you don't have to release your changes if you aren't distributing that commercial product.
e.g., If he modified it for in-house use, there is, AFAIK, no legal obligation to release those modifications (under the GPL).
If he modified it for his own use, then that's clearly the case. If he modified it for the use of others within Goldman, they might have conceivably had a claim to a copy of the source under the GPL; he would not. I'm not entirely sure of that, or of whether employment contracts &c could limit that. For that matter, I'm not entirely sure what the answer should be there.
In the typical case, probably, but if you have a large organization you could easily wind up with one exception. What rights these people do and don't have still seems important.
One exception who invited legal trouble for the organization as a matter of some kind of principle would likely find himself no longer a member of the organization. In the best-case scenario, this person gets to see the source code for an internal tool. Who exactly is going to fund this legal battle?
What about one exception who was already on the way out? Or what about one exception who was engaged in industrial espionage?
I'm just saying if you're just relying on employees not exercising rights they have - after which something you've been trying to prevent distribution of can be freely distributed - your situation is somewhat fragile.
I originally read it in some in depth article that was talking about this. I can't find this now, so I removed that part. Now that I think about article might have been talking about "spirit" of open source license - if it is useful to you, contribute back, rather then actual license requirement.
If he gets convicted of a felony it is pretty certain he won't be able to work on high frequency trading systems that compete with GS, which is likely all that they want.
I think they're more concerned with their reputation and the perception of their internal practices and controls, and most importantly the value of their "technology." Just read the second and third sentence of Goldman's reply.
Do you have any idea how rare it is for a judge to order the alleged victim of a crime to pay the defense costs of the alleged perpetrator? If I'm a conspiracy theorist, the judge that made this ruling is as well.
Ok can we please stop with the "conspiracy theorist" label/ad hominem attacks? After the NSA revelations have shown things to be a lot worse than even the more paranoid conspiracy theorists thought, folks with an eye for corruption have earned a little wiggle room to be taken seriously.
If you begin a statement with "It's very clear" then I expect you to back that statement up with facts so that the rest of us can see why it's so clear. Does it seem reasonable that Goldman Sachs want to send a message to their own programmers? Is that going to work well for them in recruiting?
If anything, the NSA revelations have given conspiracy theorists carte blanche to go full steam on their theories. You'll hardly find a thread related to Google on HN without the obligatory "Well, now that we know that Google has given NSA has unfettered access to all data..."
Another important aspect is whether or not the belief in these theories is justified, regardless of whether or not they turn out to be true. This kind of relates to the Gettier problem in epistemology, where one may "know" something completely by accident, and we wouldn't really consider that "knowledge."
Were conspiracy theorists justified in believing their theories prior to the NSA leaks? Maybe, maybe not. But we should probably consider that independently of whether or not their theories turned out to be right. After all, we can never be 100% sure of our knowledge; the best we can do is seek the most reliable methods of inquiry. If a conspiracy theorist makes 50 predictions and 45 of them turn out to be correct, then we might have a reason to adopt their thought patterns; if someone has one big suspicion and that suspicion turns out to be true, I'm not sure how much we can conclude from that.
(Sorry, I know this discussion is getting off-topic... I just have a mild fascination with conspiracy theories and epistemology.)
Nothing the NSA was doing was news. Or indeed even hidden, much of it having been previously reported on HN and even the mainstream news.
Few people connected the NSA dots because few people connect any dots. There are dozens of other important stories snowed under by the same blizzard of laziness and stupidity.
After the NSA revelations have shown things to be a lot worse than even the more paranoid conspiracy theorists thought
Really? Even the more paranoid conspiracy theorists didn't think that the Government could read the address and subject of your emails? The same people that think the Government did 9/11 and faked the moon landing?
For everyone bringing up the GPL licence, strait from the horse's mouth:
> The GPL does not require you to release your modified version. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization.
But if you release the modified version to the public in some way, the GPL requires you to make the modified source code available to the program's users, under the GPL.
Distributing the code within a company/organization does NOT constitute 'distribution', and does NOT require you to release your code.
Edit - and in the licence itself - Version 3 of the GPL
> “The Program” refers to any copyrightable work licensed under this License. Each licensee is addressed as “you”. “Licensees” and “recipients” may be individuals or organizations.
And
> To “propagate” a work means to do anything with it that, without permission, would make you directly or secondarily liable for infringement under applicable copyright law, except executing it on a computer or modifying a private copy. Propagation includes copying, distribution (with or without modification), making available to the public, and in some countries other activities as well.
I don't know why everyone keeps bringing this up. The whole point of the license applies to distribution. Even if it said you should distribute privately used modifications, that is unenforceable and stupid.
Organization seems like an odd qualifier. Certainly you have to make the code available to everyone you delivered modified binaries to, and at GPL conditions (meaning they are then free to further distribute it, per GPL)?
Not according to the GSF's website. Besides, let's face it, GS employees likely don't have any 'secret' code anywhere near their computers. It likely lives on their mainframes, and only there.
Well, it's an FAQ, it's a simplification, not the actual legally binding license.
I can't find any mention of "organization", but I do find these parts (GPLv2):
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following: [give access to the sourcecode]
Meaning everyone you distribute a copy to, you have to give access to the sourcecode, too, or provide instructions on how to get the sourcecode.
6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
Meaning distributing the program to someone gives them the full rights under the GPL.
(IANAL, so I'd be very pleased to be corrected here. Maybe the FAQ made the assumption that corporations have other means to keep employees from exercising GPL rights? Or maybe the license is to the corporation as a whole, and it itself can't break the GPL unless it distributes it to different entities?)
> “The Program” refers to any copyrightable work licensed under this License. Each licensee is addressed as “you”. “Licensees” and “recipients” may be individuals or organizations.
And
> To “propagate” a work means to do anything with it that, without permission, would make you directly or secondarily liable for infringement under applicable copyright law, except executing it on a computer or modifying a private copy. Propagation includes copying, distribution (with or without modification), making available to the public, and in some countries other activities as well.
This type of story underscores my Icarus-inspired philosophy in business: fly high but not so high that you become an obvious target or otherwise risk getting burned.
I learned relatively early that above some level (that's not even all that high), you'll find that you're dealing primarily with people whose sole purpose in life seems to be to serve their love of money and quest for validation. They are like insects drawn to a light and about as thoughtful.
Suffice to say that when you find that you have to play harder and harder to make up for the stress of your daily work life, it's time to take a look at what you really want and why you're doing what you're doing.
Truth. I was talking stocks with my girlfriend. She thought it was too scary to get involved in something as potentially volatile as the stock market. I told her basically what you just described.
There are many people in business that are literal sociopaths. They will bury and burn any and all barriers on their path to making an increase in share price. "I will not let this company flounder on my watch!", they hypothetically say in my mind. To these mythical business people, the share price is an extension of their character. Maybe that's a bit extreme and that's not why I'm investing.
But it's why the market doesn't scare me. Too many sociopaths all want one thing: the numbers to go up.
This type of story in which they initially sentenced him to 8 years in jail, has zero deterring effect on me. As far as I am concerned, it only strengthens our libertarian resolve to break through the politically controlled monopoly on the use of force.
Yeah, I didn't put two and two together until after reading the Vanity Fair article, but I'd been interacting with Sergey because we're using erlexec in a project:
Thanks for the link. Interesting read, especially the line: "The only employee of Goldman Sachs to go to jail in the aftermath of the financial crisis was the employee Goldman Sachs wanted sent to jail."
which time he sent himself, through a so-called "subversion repository," 32 megabytes of source code from Goldman’s high-frequency stock-trading system.
I can't help smile at the thought of what non-CS people might mistake a "subversion repository" for.
Just imagine the reactions you can get from talking about daemons reaping zombie children... Though given how mainstream gory video games have become, talking about Unix process management in public doesn't sound quite as shocking as it used to.
Aleynikov has lived in the US for twenty years and owns a house in Chicago. It sounds to me like he is an American programmer, not a Russian programmer. I don't see why his ancestry is relevant.
My parents owned a home and lived in USA for over 30 years... but they are, and will always be, Nigerian. Home is where the heart is. I wonder what Aleynikov would say if we asked him "Are you American or Russian? Or both?"
It seems Goldman Sachs attempted to commandeer the criminal justice system to retaliate against a former employee, and succeeded in doing so. It is not in the jurisdiction of police to act as arbiters of employment disputes -- that is for the civil court system. Whatever the allegations against Mr. Aleynikov, this I am sure we can all agree on.
The fact that they initially sentenced him to 8 years in jail, has zero deterring effect. As far as I am concerned, it only strengthens our resolve to break through the politically controlled monopoly on the use of force.
If anyone's interested, I found the appeals court ruling finding him not guilty of violating federal law, and leading to his release, on PACER, uploaded to the Internet Archive so you can access it without a paywall via RECAP:
The basic argument hinges on the three counts, related to three laws he was alleged to have broken: the Economic Espionage Act, the National Stolen Property Act, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse act. The third charge was dismissed by the district court because it rested on the fact that he had either accessed systems he was not authorized to or exceeded authorized access. However, he was authorized to access the source code in question, and what he did with it afterwards has no bearing on whether he exceeded his authorization, so it doesn't fall under the CFAA.
The district court did convict him on the first two counts, but the Appeals Court reversed. Their argument is that the National Stolen Property Act doesn't apply because it applies only to actual physical goods, not mere intangible ideas. Had he photocopied the source and walked out with it, or loaded it onto a thumb drive at the office and taken that with him, it would have counted as stealing a physical good, but merely uploading it to a server and downloading it onto a thumb drive later does not count.
The court further argues that he did not violate the Economic Espionage Act because the clause in question he was prosecuted under specifically requires that the "trade secret ... is related to or included in a product that is produced for or placed in interstate or foreign commerce". Since Goldman Sachs' HFT trading system entirely proprietary and internal and not produced for or placed in interstate commerce, that particular law does not apply. Apparently Congress specifically intended this restriction, because earlier drafts of the statute had broader language that merely included "proprietary economic information having a value of not less than $100,000". The fact that Goldman Sachs uses the product for interstate commerce is not compelling, it had to itself be produced for or placed in interstate commerce.
That last part is interesting. It implies that if you run proprietary, internal code that is not sold or intended to be sold in the future, you appear to lose federal criminal trade secret protections. It's interesting that they tried to prosecute him on theft, trade secret infringement, and exceeding authorized access, but not copyright infringement. From my reading even unpublished work is subject to copyright.
Neither the original conviction nor the appeals court opinion ever addressed the copyright issue. In order for him to have stolen something, it would have had to be something of value; so why wasn't he further prosecuted for copyright violation? From the documents I read (not all are available on PACER), the copyright question never even came up.
A few of the things he had downloaded were their version of the Erlang platform, which is available under the Erlang Public License, a derivative of the Mozilla Public License. So it would be more fruitful to debate the merits of that license, not the GPL.
I may be understanding the laws wrong, but I believe that he wasn't prosecuted for copyright law because copyright law mainly deals with redistribution, not personal use. Even the DMCA in its worst interpretation only disallows circumventing DRM to make a copy for personal use; making a copy for personal use by itself has never been covered by copyright law. Since he wasn't planning to redistribute the code he copied, he wasn't affected by copyright law.
Is he on trial again after an appeals court already found him not guilty? The article is a little unclear on that point. First it says he's suing Goldman to recoup losses, and then at the end it says:
Aleynikov has pleaded not guilty and is waiting for his trial in New York State Court.
Does "not guilty" refer to the trial in which he's suing them? Or is there another trial even though he's already been found not guilty (double jeopardy)?
Yes, he's on trial now for violating state laws, since the appeals court ruled that the federal laws in question did not apply to his case.
So, he's been found not to be guilty of those particular federal crimes, but there may be state crimes that he could still be found guilty of. They are separate jurisdictions and separate laws, so it doesn't count as double jeopardy.
The Bill of Rights, like most of the Constitution except clearly identified provisions, wasn't originally intended to apply to the states. It was only in the 20th century that the Supreme Court started the process of incorporating provisions of the Bill of Rights to the states via the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment (which was a reconstruction amendment explicitly imposing restrictions on the states).
So the clear text of the Constitution, as the drafters understood it, did not prohibit concurrent federal and state criminal trials for the same crime. Indeed, it imposed no limits on state criminal procedure at all. No due process, no nothing.
IANAL, but if I understand correctly, to claim copyright infringement, they would have had to register the work with the library of congress, and essentially make it publicly viewable - which I assume they didn't want.
Copyright in this kind of case is usable almost exclusively by GPL style licenses, where the code is already available.
Registering allows you to sue for more money than if you don't register, but any creative work is automatically protected by copyright law (including full rights to control and prevent reproduction/distribution) automatically as of the moment the work is first fixed into a "tangible form of expression".
That's not entirely correct. From the U.S. copyright statute, 17 USC 411: "... no civil action for infringement of the copyright in any United States work shall be instituted until preregistration or registration of the copyright claim has been made in accordance with this title." [1]
(The term "United States work" is defined in 17 USC 101 [2]. There are certain exceptions, unlikely to be relevant.)
So if you find out someone is infringing and want to sue, you begin registration for copyright and file suit shortly after. It doesn't say it had to be registered when the infringement happened.
> So if you find out someone is infringing and want to sue, you begin registration for copyright and file suit shortly after. It doesn't say it had to be registered when the infringement happened.
Technically that's correct -- but there are some possible adverse consequences if you don't register before the infringement begins (or alternatively within a three-month window after first publication). Specifically:
a) you forfeit the option of seeking "statutory damages," and instead you have to prove up your actual economic loss and any additional profits made by the infringer arising from the infringement; and
b) you don't get to seek attorneys' fees from the infringer if you win --- but if the infringer wins, the infringer can still seek attorneys' fees from you.
Registering allows you to sue for more money than if you don't register,
Maximum is $250,000 per infringement if it is registered (and possible jail time for 10 or more infringements). If it is not registered then liabilty is just (simplified version) the retail price of each work infringed.
So, without registering it and without ever pricing it for sale, it could be argued that the damages would be $0.
The real tragedy is how many brilliant and motivated people end up in finance nowadays and how the industry overall continues to grow into an ever greater portion of the US economy. I'm not belittling the role of finance in an advanced economy. But you would think with the incredible advances we've made in electronic exchanges and the free flow of information on the internet the role of finance would have taken a backseat. Unfortunately, Sergey is just another example (guilty or not) of wasted talent down the financial sink hole.
"On 8 September 2005, the Seoul Central District Court ruled that the GPL was not material to a case dealing with trade secrets derived from GPL-licensed work. Defendants argued that since it is impossible to maintain trade secrets while being compliant with GPL and distributing the work, they are not in breach of trade secrets. This argument was considered without ground."
Double jeopardy is to conceptually prevent a person from going free, but then being tried again and convicted. The idea is "once you're acquitted, you're acquitted" That wouldn't be the case here since he was already convicted so additional trials could only benefit him.
But really it's a judge ruling that the original trial was all effed up and that a new trial would need to take place in order to do justice.
This is right in general but wrong on the specifics of this case. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on the original, federal trial. That court threw overturned the conviction entirely; it did not order a retrial.
The state prosecution was an entirely different matter, which is why they had to strain to pretend it wasn't double jeopardy. The "acts" were the same but they had decided to classify them as different, lesser crimes. In fact he had already served more time than he could have been sentenced under those, rendering the whole proceeding nothing more than a farcical publicity stunt.
Umm.... let me get this straight, GS is required to pay the legal fees because he was an employee at GS? So if the company sues one of its employees, it has to pay for both sides? Really?
PS: If i remember correctly, hadn't Sergey resigned from GS by then? I thought he was just hanging around an extra week or two to train his successors.
> It's actually fairly common throughout the western world that the loser of a civil suite must supply legal fees.
It is uncommon in the United States. Which is why it's surprising.
In the last 200 years, American common law has diverged a great deal from British/Commonwealth common law, both in the law itself, and in how it's practiced.
It pretty explicitly details how the "backup" program he wrote had flags to select what to copy and some of those flags specifically copied GS option pricing code that he had never worked on.
I see that he wrote a backup script that could backup two distinct groups of files depending on what argument he passed on the command-line.
While the indictment mentions that some of the files included stuff he didn't work on, it doesn't say he set flags specifically to grab stuff he hadn't worked on. Only that it was getting swept up as part of a larger backup operation.
It also said he ran the backup on many occasions throughout his employment at Goldman. That doesn't sound like someone who only absconded with code after he got an offer to work at a competitor.
As an aside -- I'm wondering if "the website" referenced in the filing was rapidshare. Weren't they in Germany?
I don't think your comment and my comment fundamentally agree. There are two issues at play here:
1) Did he copy propriety GS code that he had no involvement with. A lot of people seem in this thread seem to think he didn't, but as far as I can tell from the indictment it's pretty explicit that he did and I don't think that it's disputed by either side.
2) Was his intention out of malice (intention to steal trade secrets), stupidity or something in between.
The first is the point I'm making without commenting on the second.
Question: does anyone know if software patents were declared null and void, would this case still exist? It seems he only took snippets of code and not the entire system for profit. How would this case differ if software was copyrightable but not patentable (i.e. Either you stole the manuscript or you didn't)?
Trade secrets are an entirely different category from patents. Patents require you to disclose all the details.
Trade secrets, which is likely what such software is likely to be declared to be, is, well, secret. As such, it has legal protection different than patents or copyrights.
Doesn't matter. Open source licences, patents, nothing matter. Code on the employer's computer is considered property, copying it is the same as stealing the actual workstation...
That was sarcasm (btw). And I was pointing out the article was pointing out the programmer was Russian for absolutely no reason. Why was it important for us to know his nationality?
