I didn't downvote you, but I suspect you're being downvoted because there's a growing suspicion in these comments that this startup was breaking the law.
Large companies are more regulated in that regard: Apple can't deploy a questionably-legal music streaming service as easily as a startup can. Startups can afford to do this because the risk is that they shut down, the founders walk away basically intact because of the corporate veil, and nobody else is affected. Apple doesn't have that option.
If Apple were forced to work with the startup, the startup would have to adopt the same risk profile and approach to the law as Apple. Arguably, that's exactly what happened here, through Apple calling attention to them.
(Note that I'm not expressing an opinion on whether the law is correct. It is what it is. I hear good reasons to believe that Aereo was wrongly decided, but they still took a legally risky approach and lost at the Supreme Court, and the option for an orderly shutdown via bankruptcy existed because they were a startup doing nothing else.)
> Apple can't deploy a questionably-legal music streaming service as easily as a startup can.
There is an illustration of that. Big companies using a lot of contractors normally go through intermediary contractor agencies simply to avoid the risk that the contractor become legally recognized as employee. The cost of those intermediaries can be as much as an extra 20% of the contractor rate - that's significant.
As a small startup, initially Uber could operate directly with contractor driver and save that amount. Now they are a big company and the news in California illustrate the kind of risk the intermediary agencies are shielding big business from.
>there's a growing suspicion in these comments that this startup was breaking the law
It is very fascinating to me still how the threads in HN tend to always reveal a much larger picture than the tone of the original piece. These discussions often have more insight than the articles that everyone is making popular!
Large companies are more regulated in that regard: Apple can't deploy a questionably-legal music streaming service as easily as a startup can. Startups can afford to do this because the risk is that they shut down, the founders walk away basically intact because of the corporate veil, and nobody else is affected. Apple doesn't have that option.
If Apple were forced to work with the startup, the startup would have to adopt the same risk profile and approach to the law as Apple. Arguably, that's exactly what happened here, through Apple calling attention to them.
(Note that I'm not expressing an opinion on whether the law is correct. It is what it is. I hear good reasons to believe that Aereo was wrongly decided, but they still took a legally risky approach and lost at the Supreme Court, and the option for an orderly shutdown via bankruptcy existed because they were a startup doing nothing else.)