131–140 of 142 posts
If anyone's interested, I found the appeals court ruling finding him not guilty of violating federal law, and leading to his release, on PACER, uploaded to the Internet Archive so you can access it without a paywall via RECAP: https://ia700209.us.archive.org/9/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.35... The basic argument hinges on the three counts, related to three laws he was alleged to have broken: the Economic Espionage Act, t…
It's very clear that Goldman is trying to punish him for leaving, while sending a message to their other programmers that if they leave, their lives will be ruined. Even if this guy ultimately wins the state trial, he will never get back the years he has spent fighting it. Goldman has already won, and in this case that is appalling.
No, it's very clear what he did was wrong. He works in an industry that does not allow you to email code home or copy it off of company computers. Goldman might be a little different, but where I've worked, this was definitely a no, no, and you could easily be fired for doing it.
He works in an industry that does not allow you to email
code home or copy it off of company computers.
For example:
The defense will demonstrate at trial that Aleynikov
regularly transferred files offsite and to a local
directory on hosts at Goldman’s development network so
that he would be able to continue working productively in
case of a network outage at Goldman to servers hosting
repositories with platform source code. The records
requested in Item 21 will demonstrate that shortly before
Aleynikov left Goldman, there was an outage that made
access to source code unavailable at least for several
hours that impacted developers’ productivity. This
information will aid the defense in demonstrating that
Aleynikov did not have the specific intent necessary to
commit the crimes with which he was been charged.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to the original article, Goldman was actually violating the license terms of the open source software it had modified by not releasing it. Further, while you and I may have our opinions, a judge found Goldman's actions to be so egregious that he ordered them to pay the defense costs for someone accused of stealing from them. That is exceedingly rare, and wouldn't have happened if there were any doubts about…
Any Russian programmer consider any administrativelimitation stupid, amd has the most of the code carved in his wetware. GS and other bozos can try to sue you for keeping the code in your brain, since you obviously taking our brain home. Or do American programmistas leave their brain in the office to comply?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Registration is not required. Registering allows you to sue for more money than if you don't register, but any creative work is automatically protected by copyright law (including full rights to control and prevent reproduction/distribution) automatically as of the moment the work is first fixed into a "tangible form of expression".
> Registration is not required. That's not entirely correct. From the U.S. copyright statute, 17 USC 411: "... no civil action for infringement of the copyright in any United States work shall be instituted until preregistration or registration of the copyright claim has been made in accordance with this title." [1] (The term "United States work" is defined in 17 USC 101 [2]. There are certain exceptions, unlikely to…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Registration is not required. That's not entirely correct. From the U.S. copyright statute, 17 USC 411: "... no civil action for infringement of the copyright in any United States work shall be instituted until preregistration or registration of the copyright claim has been made in accordance with this title." [1] (The term "United States work" is defined in 17 USC 101 [2]. There are certain exceptions, unlikely to…
So if you find out someone is infringing and want to sue, you begin registration for copyright and file suit shortly after. It doesn't say it had to be registered when the infringement happened.
Technically that's correct -- but there are some possible adverse consequences if you don't register before the infringement begins (or alternatively within a three-month window after first publication). Specifically:
a) you forfeit the option of seeking "statutory damages," and instead you have to prove up your actual economic loss and any additional profits made by the infringer arising from the infringement; and
b) you don't get to seek attorneys' fees from the infringer if you win --- but if the infringer wins, the infringer can still seek attorneys' fees from you.
Umm.... let me get this straight, GS is required to pay the legal fees because he was an employee at GS? So if the company sues one of its employees, it has to pay for both sides? Really? PS: If i remember correctly, hadn't Sergey resigned from GS by then? I thought he was just hanging around an extra week or two to train his successors.
It's actually fairly common throughout the western world that the loser of a civil suite must supply legal fees.
It is uncommon in the United States. Which is why it's surprising.
In the last 200 years, American common law has diverged a great deal from British/Commonwealth common law, both in the law itself, and in how it's practiced.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the Vanity Fair article, it sounds like Goldman is in fact violating the terms of the license, but not in the way you're describing. (I.e., not by refusing to release changes.) According to the article Goldman would routinely strip off the license/copyright from off of the open source code file and replace it with their own copyright. And that is a violation of many open source licenses.
I could be wrong, but wouldn't it only be a violation to release the code after stripping off the license/copyright?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course. At an investment bank such as GS, no code or algorithm is written that isn't checked by traders and managers...
Very dry humor!
When a single bug can do a billion dollars in damage or bankrupt you, nothing is left to chance...
For those that are interested in the backstory: http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2013/09/michael-lewis-gol...