American insider trading law has nothing to do with fairness. It is based on theft of information. In this case, the hacker’s stole information from the SEC that belonged to the reporting companies.
(This is a commonly misunderstood alley of securities law.)
"One objection is that it violates the fiduciary duties that corporate employees, as agents, owe to their principals, the shareholders (Wilgus 1910)."
That supports the theft formulation.
"A related objection is that, because managers control the production of, disclosure of, and access to inside information, they can transfer wealth from outsiders to themselves in an arbitrary and hidden way (Brudney 1979; Clark 1986)."
Again, supports the theft formulation.
"The economic rationale advanced for prohibiting insider trading is that such trading can adversely affect securities markets (Khanna 1997) or decrease the firm’s value (Haft 1982)."
This seems like the fairness argument, though.
[1]: https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/InsiderTrading.html
Insider trading regs, as currently enforced in USA, get this exactly backwards. Senior C-suiters are not prohibited from trading their firm's stock. They only have to carefully choreograph that trading with respect to other events. They get as much advance time as they need to do this, and as much professional help as they (or the firm) can afford. They get all this time to scheme and pre-arrange, precisely because insider trading laws exist to hammer the lowly middle managers who would like to do their own trading on inside information.
The sooner trading based on information occurs, the sooner that information is public. The effect of these regulations is to keep secrets and make misguided investment more likely. All executives of a public corporation are in a conspiracy against the investing public. Insider trading laws function precisely to punish defectors from that conspiracy. This defection should rather be encouraged, so these are yet another set of laws the effect of which is entirely backwards from their supposed justification.
You are essentially stealing from your own company, since your purchase of shares will drive up price and result in your employer paying more than they otherwise would have.
Though for the record, I think insider trading should be legal, or at least should be a civil instead of a criminal matter.
The purpose of financial markets is decentralized price discovery and preventing the trading of certain types of non-public information is totally counterproductive in that regard.
That’s theft of company (read: shareholders’) information by a fiduciary.
Remember: America has no statute barring insider trading. The rules were developed through case law. (There’s a hypothetical of “if a company insider shouts material nonpublic information on the street and you trade on it, is that insider trading” that lawyers love to opine on, but to my understanding that’s never come up in court.)
This is a common misunderstanding with respect to insider trading.
FWIW, I'm not expressing an opinion on insider trading, just arguing that this specific claim is overly broad.
If your only relation with a company is to own stock in it, you're not an insider, but any research you do may be based on public information, but is nevertheless material and as private as you keep it.
And there's a lot of research to do. The economic fable "I, Pencil" is about the sheer number of firms that any given firm is indirectly dependent on and indirectly affects. Thus, if you see shocks affecting any upstream suppliers, the shocks are public information but your knowledge that it's relevant to the firm you're invested in is private to you.