Courts: Goldman Sachs code crook didn’t break the law

The New York Post reports:

He took the code, but it wasn’t a crime.

That’s the stunning opinion of a federal appeals court that overturned the conviction of Sergey Aleynikov, a former Goldman Sachs programmer accused of stealing the bank’s computer code for its high-speed trading operations before he decamped to a rival outfit.

A three-judge panel, in revealing for the first time its reasons for ruling that Aleynikov was wrongly charged with theft and corporate espionage, said that while his actions were “dishonest” and wrong, they fell short of criminal conduct.

The judges cited two reasons in their opinion. First, the code didn’t qualify as a tangible good under a federal theft statute. And second, the code was not a product intended for sale.

An article well worth your time.