The War On Hackers

But on a more serious note what the post talks about is worrying we can't have computer illiterate people making laws and decisions that could have far reaching implications on how we use computers.

Original comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6595993

Things to know:

No, a judge did not order Thuen's laptop siezed because he was a "hacker".

No, the fact that Thuen claimed to be a hacker did not play into whether Thuen's laptop was examined and imaged.

No, Thuen did not simply leave Batelle to create an open-source version of his project.

There are no similarities between Thuen's case and Swartz's.

What happened here is straightforward. Thuen was an employee of Batelle. He was a developer on Batelle's "Sophia" project. While working for Batelle, he commenced work on his own version of "Sophia", called "Visdom". Batelle fired him. He took "Visdom" and created a new company, "Southfork", which sponsored "Visdom" as an open source project. Batelle sued, and Thuen admitted copying at least some components from "Sophia". Batelle prevailed in a preliminary injunction to have "Visdom" taken down, and, in the ongoing suit, made a discovery request for an image Thuen's laptop. The court agreed, as is routine in civil cases, with the proviso that the image be delivered directly to the court for escrow and not examined directly by Batelle.

There is an annoying wrinkle to this story: the judge did use Thuen's statements about being a hacker as justification for the idea that Thuen might spoil the evidence on the hard drive once notified about the discovery request; Batelle's outside forensic investigator was therefore not required to give advance notice to Thuen. But that is the only thing that the word "hacker" determined in this case.

It is absolutely bog standard for hard drive images to constitute discoverable evidence in civil cases, and it is not at all surprising that an full time software developer might get sued for copying their employer's product (even if it didn't share code, which apparently isn't the case here).

Jim Denaro read an earlier stage of this game of telephone in Ars Technica and called it "dangerously wrong about the law"; the facts of this case are even more attenuated in TechCrunch, which does not give a shit if you know what is actually happening, and is running this story solely to generate rageviews.