In the latest twist to the legal travails of Sergey Aleynikov, who is accused of theft of Goldman-Sach’s illegal market front-running high frequency trading software is now arguing that the code in question was open source, so there was no theft:

Sergey Aleynikov, who is accused of stealing Goldman Sachs’ source code used in high-frequency trading, argued that he was standing up to the investment bank’s proprietary claims on open-source code, not trying to steal private codes to use at a competing trading firm.

Mr Aleynikov, a former computer programmer at the bank, is accused of downloading proprietary code related to high-speed trading systems in June 2009 for use at a new job at a competing firm.

While this statement may actually be true, it does strike me as a rather low percentage defense.

Unfortunately, it also implies that we will not be getting any details on how the Vampire Squid and its Wall Street co-conspirators might actually be gaming the system with their co-located high speed trading systems during the trial.