Hearing an appeal by a former Goldman Sachs computer engineer convicted of stealing code from the bank, New York Court of Appeals judges Tuesday questioned defendant Sergey Aleynikov’s assertion that he did not make a tangible copy of the code because he had saved it on a hard drive.

The arguments before New York’s high court were the latest stage of Aleynikov’s nearly decadelong legal saga regarding his appropriation of the bank’s source code for high-frequency trades, which has highlighted the ongoing challenge of applying laws that have been on the books for decades to cases involving relatively new technologies.