Beware the Vampire Squid

Before you take that job programming at an investment bank or hedge fund you may want to read Felix Salmon’s post and Michael Lewis’s article on the case of Sergey Aleynikov. He was a top programmer at Goldman Sachs, who was then prosecuted and convicted of stealing proprietary computer code. The conviction was eventually overturned but he has now been charged again for the same crime under a different law. According to Lewis, the code was mostly modified open source stuff that Aleynikov emailed to himself for future reference of what he had done and had little value outside of Goldman. Salmon thinks that Goldman aggressively pursued this case because in order for the directors of the programming division to justify their bonuses, they need to make it look like the code, which they don’t understand, is important. If Goldman Sachs had a public relations problem before, the Lewis article will really put it over the top. This case certainly makes me thing that we should change the criminal code and leave cases of intellectual theft by employees to the civil courts and not force the taxpayer to pick up the tab. Also, what is the point for putting a harmless nonviolent programmer in jail for 8 years. We could at least have him serve his sentence doing something useful like writing code to improve city traffic flow. Finally, the open software foundation may have a case against Goldman and other firms who use open source code and then violate the open source license agreement. I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard to find a backer with deep pockets to pursue the case.