You certainly make a good point, but I disagree with your conclusion. Ideally, a law is drafted as narrowly as possible. Otherwise, it is open to extremely bro

You certainly make a good point, but I disagree with your conclusion. Ideally, a law is drafted as narrowly as possible. Otherwise, it is open to extremely broad interpretation and eventually becomes far removed from its original purpose ( the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and RICO are examples of laws where this principle has not been followed). If a more "principled law" were to replace the current OTA rules, it would certainly be far more expansive to include all immediately foreseeable edge cases (Congress tends not to get excessively involved in the finer points of modern tech, partially due to awareness that incorrect jargon could result in a law becoming obsolete in a few years). The cited opinion does not rely on the minutea of the tech at all, the judge is using the technical description to illustrate how a complex technical scheme can be used to circumvent the intent of a law. And generally, judges do not look favorably on what they percieve to be "legal tricks", in this case, applying the unarguably legal example of private OTA viewing to a far more expansive scheme to act as a secondary provider of OTA streams without properly licensing them for redistribution. I'm sure that the law could be rewritten in a more "principled" way, but there's a very good chance we could end up with something like the CFAA, which would be far worse than relatively narrow judicial interpretations of the current law.