For whatever reason, apparently the publishers didn't see fit to press a DMCA claim. It's a little puzzling, really. All these years, the DMCA's anti-circumvention has been the bogeyman we tell stories about around our blog and forum campfires. It's illegal to crack DRM
for any purpose, even if you want to make fair use. It's illegal
even to tell people how to crack DRM.
Sure you've got your interoperability provisions, but the precedents
are pretty murky overall, with one judge outright saying that if Congress had meant fair use to be a defense against the DMCA, they would have outright said so. The overall effect is to scare people into not even trying to take the claims to court.
Which brings us back to wondering why the publishers didn't throw in an antii-circumvention charge, too. It's a puzzler. And it's also the reason why this ruling may not amount to much in the end. I'm not a lawyer, but it would seem to me that if someone tries to use this ruling as precedent, all the opposition needs to do is point out that the ruling didn't consider the law in question at all.