TL;DR
Programmer gets sent down for stealing proprietary code.<p>Gets released on appeal due to, what appears to be, a procedural issue (it doesn't go into much detail).<p>From my point of view, the chap blatantly stole the code. The whole premise of this article is that that's ok 'cos it probably wasn't very important code. Right.<p>My only take away is that the US has some seriously out of kilter sentences for these types of offences. 8 years is absurd.