According to the court documents, this is approximately what they did. The men discovered that immediately following their bid the asking price would increase, without exception. The so-called scam then occurred according to this scheme (example from court documents) Buy 1000 shares at NOK 205.50
buy 500 shares at NOK 206.00
buy 300 shares at NOK 206.50
buy 200 shares at NOK 207.00
buy 200 shares at NOK 207.50
buy 200 shares at NOK 208.00
buy 200 shares at NOK 208.50
sell 1000 shares at NOK 207.50
sell 500 shares at NOK 207.50
sell 500 shares at NOK 207.00
sell 500 shares at NOK 206.50
sell 100 shares at NOK 206.50


This all occurred within 90 seconds, and earned them NOK 1 835 (after fees), but with no stocks actually in their possession.

This type of trading occurred many times over about 2 years time, and once their purchasing pattern event caused trading in some shares to be suspended.

Also according to the court documents, the laws more or less leave the details of describing what counts as fraudulent up to the finance authorities ( by comparing their actions to what is deemed normal for the market, etc.).

Thus, the court seems to me to be judging it the way the lawmakers intended.

I do wish the courts would just laugh at their stupid algorithms though... I'd certainly have been very embarrassed if I wrote such bad code.

Having had experience with how unpacking compressed PE files myself, here's a probable reason why this is a problem:

To be able to unpack a PE file, you must either get the official unpacking code from the developer (which is in many cases not possible), or you must make your own (well, obviously). Now, to make it yourself, you can extract the unpacking code from any file known to be compressed by the packer, and add that to your unpacking code, or you can actually copy out the code from the file you're currently unpacking and patch it so it fits your program. This works because you know the signature of the unpacking code and you know where in memory it will read/write.

The problem occurs if a known packer's unpacking code is amended do something else, but still fit the signature.

The main reason why they'd want to piggyback on the executable's code is due to the high number of versions of the packing code. They could quite easily crack them all as they appear, but if you use the file's own code, you have a generic unpacking routine that saves you lots of time and money.