That this would apply to DRM was my first thought as well, though I think it's a little disingenuous to imply that the use of a personal-privacy-preserving scenario instead of a DRM scenario as the motivating narrative for the research might in some way be an attempt to whitewash the technology. Microsoft genuinely has an interest in solving the problem of, for example, how to create trust for Word users to store their documents in Microsoft's cloud, as well as an interest in how to enable major league sports to trust Windows phone devices to stream live games. Trust's a big deal.

The fact is that the same things which make DRM impossible absolutely do make it impossible for users to trust file sharing websites, or cloud-compute customers to trust platform-as-a-service providers. And this capability has the potential to support all kinds of scenarios - some arguably good from a personal-privacy-and-liberty point of view, some maybe bad from your subjective viewpoint.

The DRM narrative always has this 'big media hanging on to their outdated business models' narrative, but often the same people who complain about intrusive DRM are the first to complain when some company abuses an individual's copyright by using a flickr photo without permission. DRM isn't evil, just because some people might use it in ways you disapprove of.

DRM definitely has the potential to do good things. The DRM-based Steam marketplace (and also to a large extent the mobile appstores) has probably been a net good, for example, for both video game creators and consumers.