Idiots
That is all.
Three men have been charged with pilfering trade secrets from a Wall Street firm after two of them emailed themselves computer code belonging to their former employer from their company email accounts. Glen Cressman and Jason Vuu, both former employees of Wall Street firm Flow Traders, were each charged with unlawful …
Even if it was sensitive data these guys are in the 'financial sector' so any hard time would likely be extremely limited anyway. We can't be locking up the crooks experts who keep the whole wonky mess from falling over.
According to Bloomberg, Vuu was aware that he was doing something illicit, because he would sometimes change the file formats of email attachments in an attempt to conceal what it was that he was sending himself.
Yeah, because it couldn't be that he just changed the extension of a file to get it past some draconian spam/malware filter.
I agree with your point entirely, but I am tired of the self-censoring that is continuously going on here.
We're all adults, there are no kids in these forums (much too boring for them, it's all text and no titties). So, if you want to use the word asshole, let's all be adult enough to use it. And reading "f*ck" has always made me cringe. Come on, people, everyone knows what you're writing, so have the balls to write it properly or write something else entirely.
There, PC rant ended.
And indeed I normally show my vulgar tongue here without reserve. There is only one word which is still generally considered brutal enough to be considered socially unacceptable even in most adult company. That level of brutality was the only fitting abuse I could think of at the time for that bunch of crooked sociopathic fucking wanknut arseholes upon whom I wish only ill.
Surely if they had skills to re-purpose code then they could have....
Copied it to USB
Printed it out
Written it down
Used a screwdriver & borrowed the hard drive for a night
Used bolt cutters and borrowed the PC for the night
Surely they would have drawn less attention to their plan if they simply nicked the PC, although I recall a recent hardware burglary where the thieves de-racked hundreds of servers only to painstakingly remove every hard drive and leave them on the data hall floor. Even they weren't that stupid.
Technically yes, as then it isn't "theft" (which in English law is "to dishonestly appropriate property with the intention to permanently deprive the owner of it"). Leaving the car demonstrates your intention not to permanently deprive the owner of it. Eventually they had to bring in the offence of "taking without consent" to cover car theft/joyriding.
/thread diversion.
One has to wonder what criminal act they have committed?
Copying the program? That's civil copyright breach. Not criminal.
Running the program to guide their investments? I'd find it hard pushed to call that obtaining money by deception.
I can see plenty of civil law stuff that they could be in breach of, such as employment contracts, duty of confidentiality etc.
But where is the criminal act?
Based on the article it sounds like the code acquired implemented trade secrets. The crime isn't stealing the code, it's stealing the trade secret. Which is assumed to be damaging to the company and I believe is a criminal offense, just like stealing their servers outright would be.
It's been 20 years now since I was privy to a trade secret covered by a patent. Given the time period, I assume the patent is expired and I wouldn't be liable for talking about it. It was a very, very small detail. Certainly something any competitor willing to invest in a research team would have found because it was how the patent owning company found it in the first place. But common decency prohibits me from talking about it. That company is the one that spent the money on the research, they are the ones who should benefit from it.
You can have a trade secret on something, or a patent, but not both. The whole point of a patent is that you give up secrecy in return for temporary legal protection.
Trade secrets give you some protection until someone leaks it out, or figures it out independently of the company. The person leaking it out will get into trouble for leaking it out, but after that, anyone else can publish and use it, because it is no longer a secret.