A unanimous New York Court of Appeals has affirmed the criminal conviction of a former Goldman Sachs computer engineer convicted of stealing the bank’s high-frequency trading code, rejecting defendant Sergey Aleynikov’s argument that saving the code on a hard drive did not count as taking up tangible space.

“Ideas begin in the mind,” Judge Eugene Fahey wrote in the signed decision. “By its very nature, an idea, be it a symphony or computer source code, begins as intangible property. However, the medium upon which an idea is stored is generally physical, whether it is represented on a computer hard drive, vinyl record, or compact disc.”

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