Last week I spoke about how the government should help organizations protect their trade secrets and not just through patents, because the information of a patent is free to the public. This has proven to be a consistent problem in the financial industry. For example, last years a financial analyst for Goldman Sachs stole a complete trading program from the company, sent it to Germany in order to sell, and then erased it from his computer. When he was caught he was not convicted because the law was not written for that specific situation.Since the software was still being developed and it was only for assisting in international commerce. So it is unfortunate that he got away with stealing such valuable software.
Well a few months later Congress stepped up to protect our trade secrets. They recently added trade secret protection policies for more industries and raised the penalty for stealing trade secrets with two new acts. First, Theft of trade Secrets Clarification Act of 2012, which added into law the wording that stealing a product or service with the intention of using it in a foreign economy. This now includes stealing software from financial institutions. Second the Foreign and Economic Espionage Penalty Enhancement Act of 2012 which raised the maximum monetary penalty by 10 times, from $500,000 to $5 million for committing economic espionage. So it now penalizes someone who steals a product or service with intention of selling it overseas to another company or government. Thankfully, Congress has done something to protect U.S intellectual property.
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