Trade Secrets & Employee Mobility

In an order dated April 20, 2017, New York’s Court of Appeals agreed to hear Sergey Aleynikov’s appeal of his conviction under an arcane New York criminal statute.

Aleynikov is a former Goldman Sachs computer programmer, arrested in July 2009 and accused of stealing computer source code from the bank.  Originally, a federal jury found him guilty of violating both the National Stolen Property Act and the Economic Espionage Act, but that verdict was overturned by the Second Circuit in April 2012 (after Aleynikov had been incarcerated for over a year).

More recently, Aleynikov also ...

[caption id="attachment_2116" align="alignright" width="113"] James P. Flynn[/caption]

In the recent case of United States v. Nosal, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit confirmed the applicability of both the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Economic Espionage Act as safeguards against theft of trade secrets by departed former employees.  Importantly, Nosal applied such laws to convict a former employee in a case involving domestic businesses and personnel without any alleged overseas connections.  Because of civil enforcement provisions in the CFAA ...

In what has become an annual rite, legislators from both sides of the aisle in the U.S. Congress again have proposed a bill seeking to create a private right of action allowing companies to assert civil trade secret misappropriation claims under federal law (which would supplement the existing patchwork of state law remedies).  As we have blogged previously, similar bills were introduced in 2013 and 2014, but despite some progress they were not enacted into law.

Like past legislative efforts, the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2015 would amend the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 (which ...

Summary: On September 26, 2013, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction and four-year prison sentence of a former Motorola engineer for theft of trade secrets under the Economic Espionage Act.

A California legislator recently introduced two bills in Congress which, if passed, could have profound effects for companies seeking to pursue claims relating to trade secrets and confidential information - one bill would create a new private right of action under federal law for trade secret theft, while the other bill would appear to limit plaintiffs' abilities to pursue existing remedies for computer fraud and abuse.

The Economic Espionage Act ("EEA"), 18 U.S.C. §§ 1831-39, gives companies another tool in the fight against misappropriation of trade secrets to "adopt a national scheme to protect U.S. proprietary economic information" and to combat the rising tide of espionage against and threats to corporate trade secrets. It criminalizes misappropriation of trade secrets.