"The court then ruled that the First Amendment was satisfied because the government's purpose was to control the "function" of the software rather than its "content," and that the statute did not ban more speech than necessary to meet its goal of preventing piracy and promoting electronic commerce."

This is similar to the New York decision. The courts are basically coming to the conclusion that its legal to talk about how to circumvent things, and that usually code is speech, but code can be banned, even as speech, if it is functionally easy to use to break the law, and that it is mostly used to break the law, just as its illegal to post credit card numbers to the internet even though this is, technically, speech. This is probably a fair balance on the speech vs. tool question. The problem that this poses for me is if the intent is fair use then this is a fundamentally different sort of behaviour then if the intent is piracy. However, that may not be a consitutional issue, but rather something that is determined on a case by case basis. I wish I had time to read the full decision. I may read it anyway...

EFF Media Release: Judge Rejects Challenge to eBook Case (May 8, 2002)