What Aleynikov did was clearly slap-on-the-wrist-worthy. It's not like he took code and sold it to the highest bidder for zillions of dollars. It didn't merit depleting his entire life's savings and (almost) sending him to jail for many years. This was clearly about more than merely the value of the code he took.

> The Court concluded that he had in fact tried to take 500,000 lines of valuable and mostly proprietary source code

I would dispute the value of the code. The code he took wasn't part of the "secret sauce". It didn't contain any of the logic for actually making High-speed trades.