The Aereo case is being decided by people who call iCloud ‘the iCloud.’ Yes, really.

[Commentary] In the end, the Supreme Court's ideal frame of reference was the phonograph. The fact that their first instinct was to turn to an invention created 137 years ago speaks gigabytes for how well the Justices approach the day's most important technology cases.

It's easy to poke fun at the bench. Justice Sonia Sotomayor kept referring to cloud services alternately as "the Dropbox," "the iDrop," and "the iCloud." Chief Justice John Roberts apparently struggled to understand that Aereo keeps separate, individual copies of TV shows that its customers record themselves, not one master copy that all of its subscribers have access to.

Justice Stephen Breyer said he was concerned about a cloud company storing "vast amounts of music" online that then gets streamed to a million people at a time -- seemingly unaware of the existence of services like Spotify or Google Play. And Justice Antonin Scalia momentarily forgot that HBO doesn't travel over the airwaves like broadcast TV.

Yes, it's fun to mock Justices who seem clueless about technology. But the truth is that the laws themselves are often far behind technology. When a justice asks about a phonograph, it's because he is trying to go back to the most basic examples that support the current legal framework. And if a Justice truly doesn't understand the basics of some technology, you wouldn't want them not to ask these questions out of fear of ridicule.