This guy was probably getting a fat paycheck during his time at GS, and then when he left he tried to take some of the code that he worked on. It's long been i

This guy was probably getting a fat paycheck during his time at GS, and then when he left he tried to take some of the code that he worked on. It's long been illegal to take intellectual property (even if you made it) from your employer. But to make a law, you have to define things like "take", to exclude the case of an employee taking home his work to be more productive, which may be against company policy but shouldn't be illegal. Inevitably, the law fails to capture the full complexity of the universe and ambiguities are resolved in court. There's nothing wrong about the government and damaged party pursuing charges in cases where the law is ambiguous. That's what courts are for. When the federal courts ruled that federal law didn't cover Sergey's actions, the New York state prosecutor thought that a unique element of New York law might make things different in state court. Nothing wrong with that.