There are some details in the case that are as you say, about Peak having "unclean hands" in effect, but they're fairly beside the point for the case's broader

There are some details in the case that are as you say, about Peak having "unclean hands" in effect, but they're fairly beside the point for the case's broader significance. What it really stands/stood for is the notion that a "copy" sufficient for the operation of copyright law occurs when a program is loaded from disk to RAM, and therefore it's possible to infringe copyright merely by using software that you aren't personally licensed for. MAI basically used this theory to make third-party maintenance of their systems illegal, so Congress responded by amending the Copyright Act, but in an extremely narrow way: there's a carve out specifically for maintenance and repair.