United States v. Aleynikov

In 2011, Sergey Aleynikov was sentenced to more than eight years in prison for the theft of trade secrets under the Economic Espionage Act and transportation of stolen property in interstate commerce under the National Stolen Property Act (NSPA). This case marked the first instance of federal prosecutors using the Economic Espionage Act (EEA) to police the misuse of source code related to high frequency trading. The trade secrets at issue are segments of computer source code from Goldman Sachs & Co. (Goldman) that are used in its high frequency trading platform.

In February 2012, the court reversed Aleynikov’s conviction of trade secrets theft in a one-page order. In an opinion published April 11, 2012, the Second Circuit held that Sergey Aleynikov was wrongly charged with theft of property because the code did not qualify as a physical object under a federal theft statute. The court held that “because Aleynikov did not ‘assume physical control’ over anything when he took the source code, and because he did not thereby ‘deprive [Goldman] of its use,’ Aleynikov did not violate the [National Stolen Property Act].” It also ruled that Aleynikov was wrongly charged with espionage, since the code was not a product designed for interstate or foreign commerce. The decision called into question the government’s ability to prosecute theft of internal trading systems or other internal financial instruments under the Economic Espionage Act.

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