The ballroom-dancing former Goldman Sachs vice-president Sergey Aleynikov had his conviction overturned in a Manhattan federal appeals court today after almost a year in prison on charges he stole trade secrets from the investment bank. Aleynikov was sentenced to eight years for moving intellectual property in interstate and foreign commerce after he uploaded Goldman’s software codes for high-speed trading to a server, for use at a new job. The company claimed the proprietary information was crucial to their competitive advantage, but Aleynikov said he just meant to take the open-source portion of the coding and accidentally ended up with more than he intended. Today, the programmer said, “There is justice in the world.”
