Wow! A jury has convicted ex-Goldman Sachs programmer Sergey Aleynikov of stealing proprietary code from his former employer. He now faces up to 15 years in prison. He will be sentenced March 15.
This may come as a surprise to some. Aleynikov's defense rested on the notion that he downloaded and secreted away Goldman Sachs code. He took the code simply to separate out the proprietary code from the open source code, which he felt he was entitled to.
The defense featured experts who said that there was many instances of open source code--which was freely available on the Internet--in the Goldman code. The defense also brought up executives from the firm that had hired Aleynikov from Goldman, who said they wouldn't accept Goldman code if it was offered at no cost.
But in the end the jury disagreed and concluded Aleynikov essentially stole proprietary trade secrets and shipped them across state lines. The jurors might have been swayed by the perception of guilt the prosecution managed to create. Aleynikov, it could be argued, acted guilty when he stuck the code surreptitiously (her thought) on shadowy servers in Germany, when he covered his tracks by erasing digital footprints and the like. Perhaps he should have settled.
We covered all of this over on FierceFinanceIT, where we'll have more later. In any case, chalk this one up to the prosecutors.
For more:
- here's an AP article
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