Ex-Goldman Sachs programmer freed
Appeal court overturns conviction for code theft
A New York appeal court has acquitted Sergey Aleynikov, a former programmer in Goldman Sachs's high-frequency trading operation, of charges of economic espionage and transportation of stolen property.
Aleynikov was convicted in 2010 and sentenced to eight years in prison – according to prosecutors, he had left Goldman in 2008 for Teza Technologies, taking with him proprietary code on the workings of the bank's high-frequency trading algorithms. Throughout his original trial, Aleynikov said he had taken only open-source code – he might be guilty of breaking confidentiality agreements, his lawyers argued, but not of criminal theft or espionage.
The court will issue a full opinion explaining its ruling shortly. According to media reports, judges Dennis Jacobs, Guido Calabresi and Rosemary Pooler were critical of the decision to bring a criminal case under federal espionage law, and doubtful the software in question counted as a product traded across state boundaries (a requirement for a prosecution under the US Economic Espionage Act).
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