It's interesting, for the examples given in the article, research like this is crucial from a software perspective. If this does succeed though, I can only imagine it will make cracking all forms of DRM more prominent. And there is my conundrum. Coming from the content owner world as a musician, I don't think there is anything wrong with guarding your copyrighted media content; as it is different in scope from software used in, say, medical devices that affect peoples lives. So I think what should happen instead is along the lines of a specific exemption for security research in software/hardware and not so much a blunt legalization of all DRM hacking.
But then again, whether DRM inhibits piracy or just creates access annoyances is another topic altogether. I've admired O'Reilly's no DRM model for their ebooks, but I don't think that model would work with the non-professional and not as deeply committed audience that, say, consumers of pop music in their teens would be.