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.<p>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.