A former lawyer with the S.E.C., who asked not to be identified in order to preserve business relationships, said that for this case to qualify as insider trading, Mr. Sokol would have to have been in possession of material nonpublic information at the time he bought or sold the stock.
On their home turf in Southern California, they operate within what might be called the design-hipster nexus, a group of directors and artists whose résumés qualify as insider, but whose creative work -- as varied as music videos and skateboard design -- tends to celebrate outsiders.
David Vinjamuri, the author of "Accidental Branding" and an adjunct professor of marketing at New York University, said that a product like Magnum that became popular without a big advertising campaign qualified as an "insider brand with a cult following, one that not everyone is aware of but has a strong cachet with a certain audience".
He also has no gripes about having to wait a year from the offering date before insiders qualify for stock options.
The criminal insider trading charges filed against a Bristol-Myers Squibb executive, Robert D. Ramnarine, may well qualify for "Stupid Insider Trading Tricks".
At the same time, emerging private exchanges like SecondMarket allow qualified investors to buy stock from insiders in private firms without conducting an I.P.O.
A federal district judge dismissed the SEC case in July 2009, saying Cuban did not qualify as an insider, and at most had entered a confidentiality agreement with Mamma.com rather than an agreement not to trade.
Quoting from anonymous "industry insiders," she suggested that "ethnic talent" was pushing out qualified white actors.
He's a cranky, bitter, baggage-laden old insider who's laughably portraying himself as the outsider most qualified to reign in Washington's excess and crony capitalism.
This industrial attention is turning predictions of future careers into actual jobs for scientists--so many jobs, insiders say, that companies are having to look long and hard to find qualified scientists to fill the positions.
