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I would think this would be common sense at any job - unless otherwise specified in your contract the work that you do for your employer belongs to your employe
by pdovy 13y ago
I would think this would be common sense at any job - unless otherwise specified in your contract the work that you do for your employer belongs to your employer, full stop. According to the article he freely admits that what he took included proprietary code - that is theft.
Now, was Goldman reasonable here? No, we can probably all agree that Goldman and the government overstepped a lot of bounds chasing this guy down. That said, I don't think some form of prosecution was unreasonable.
- msandford 13y agoThat might be, but it's a CIVIL issue not a CRIMINAL one.
- BWStearns 13y agoThe commercial espionage laws might justify bringing it into a criminal case, although (and I'm only on page 7 here) it doesn't seem like they proved, or even attempted to, that the removal of the code was in the interest of using it in his new endeavor. From the sounds of it he was primarily interested in bringing out some modified libraries. So while incidentally bringing out the proprietary code might well qualify him for the civil case, the commercial espionage accusation seems pretty damned weak, especially since the laws are designed to protect trade secrets (the formula for new coke anyone?) as opposed to this blatantly more mundane potential piece of IP. Also depending on the licenses of the open source stuff (as hinted at in a prior comment), it may not have been within the guy's legal authority to hand over IP rights to GS for some of the code.
- msandford 13y agoUltimately it looks like a case of GS being able to command the government to do things. Why that's possible I have no idea. Unless they have a lot of dirt on everyone in the world.