In the federal appellate case, a dissenting judge called Aereo “a Rube Goldberg-like contrivance” designed to get around the spirit of the law. Yet it’s hard to draw a clear technical line between the technology used by Aereo and that of Cablevision’s DVR, or between that of Aereo and Apple’s (AAPL) iCloud. Apple lets consumers stream music, TV, and movies they’ve already purchased, and Aereo argues that its own service offers access to broadcast programming that would be free anyway. “The problem the court faces is that if they want to say that Aereo is violating the law, they have to explain how it’s different from Cablevision or, more generally, cloud computing,” says Christopher Sprigman, a professor at the New York University School of Law, who isn’t involved in the case.
