united-states intellectual-property business
Insider trading and time travel
<p>For purely academic purposes. This is not an ethics question.</p>

<p>John works for Google. Google decides to release a new social media network called Google+. The launch causes every Facebook member to delete their profiles and sign up for Google+. Facebook's share price plummits and Mark Zuckerberg is now homeless. John feels bad for Mark, so jumps into his time machine a day before Google+ was/is launched. He proceeds by telling Zuckerberg about the upcoming launch. Zuckerberg is able to react, causing Google launch to be a flop, leaving Facebook and John to profit in Google's loss.</p>

<ol>
<li>Is this considered insider trading?</li>
<li>If not, is it illegal in any manner?</li>
</ol>

<p>This is a serious question.</p>

<p>It doesn't matter if you kill someone with a meteorite.  Murder is murder. </p>

<p>Likewise, insider trading is insider trading no matter how you manage to pull it off.   </p>

<p>There are no exemptions for certain methods.  </p>

<p>For question one, no, this is not insider trading.  Insider Trading is when a company's stockholder is alerted to bad news about the company's performance and sells his stock prior to the information becoming available to the general public in order to cash out while the stock is great.  So this isn't considered insider training cause Zuckerberg used knowledge of another company's product to enhance his product such that he was able to avert the bad news in his own company.</p>

<p>At best, Zuckerberg committed corperate espionage, but even then that's dubious as John doesn't seem to leveraging any knowledge that he gained while in Google's employ or by hacking Googles internal company systems through illicit methods.   He did nothing that anyone with a time machine would not be able to know and discuss.</p>

<p>Finally, in U.S. jurisprudence, it's generally accepted that if no law exist that makes something illegal, then it is legal.  Since neither Temporal Insider Trading nor Temporal cooperate espionage are illegal under state or federal law, then it is legal for any point in time until such laws are passed and become effective.</p>

<p>One could make an argument for Gross Negligence on John's part as this doesn't seem to be a predestination paradox time travel incident (one in which the time travelers actions in the past will lead to the same future the travel hails from) but a "Butterfly Effect" which could dangerously unravel all of space-time and cause it to implode trying to handle John no longer traveling back in time, since Google is no longer successful and thus John would have no reason to travel back in time.  John didn't intend to destroy the universe but certainly should have known this could happen because there are a million movies that discuss this.   Of course, if the universe is destroyed, the U.S. Court Systems might not have Jurisdiction over the matter, seeing as how their jurisdiction is limited to the confines of a small portion of the Universe.</p>

<p>So likely no crime is, was, will, has been, or will have been committ(ed).  Nor is any other grammatical tense not used for the verb "committed" that I forgot/don't care to look up and see if it would possibly make sense in time travel situations.</p>

<p>(Even cheekier answer:  The Posted speed limit for time travel in the U.S. is 1 second per second and is strictly enforced.).</p>
