The result has been the same for as long as Windows has had serial keys: Pirates find a way around them, they share keys, they disable activation, they patch files, they block hostnames in their hosts files. Regular users jump through hoops, have activation issues, lose their discs, need to phone in, etc.
I'm anti-piracy in general, but whenever I install Windows 7 I always bypass the activation because I've had too many problems going legit.
Likewise with Photoshop. At a previous company, we had a license that would let us install on up to five machines. At some point, we hit that limit and couldn't activate it. The confusing thing was that we only had three machines running it (the main user's desktop, her laptop, and another coworker's laptop). What we realized was that we'd reinstalled her laptop and the coworker's laptop recently, and both of those machines were still activated.
When we called Adobe, they pointed us to a KB article on how to de-activate a Photoshop install, but that requires that it still be installed and working. Adobe said that they couldn't actually de-activate those machines. After some arguing back and forth, they agreed to add another machine to our account (so now we have six machines registered, four with it installed, and two using it concurrently). Now, every time we reformat a machine, we have to call them again because no one remembers to de-register Photoshop before they reformat a user's machine.
iTunes lets you register five computers, and if you hit the limit, de-register them all to start over again. How hard is that?
I'm anti-piracy in general, but whenever I install Windows 7 I always bypass the activation because I've had too many problems going legit.
Likewise with Photoshop. At a previous company, we had a license that would let us install on up to five machines. At some point, we hit that limit and couldn't activate it. The confusing thing was that we only had three machines running it (the main user's desktop, her laptop, and another coworker's laptop). What we realized was that we'd reinstalled her laptop and the coworker's laptop recently, and both of those machines were still activated.
When we called Adobe, they pointed us to a KB article on how to de-activate a Photoshop install, but that requires that it still be installed and working. Adobe said that they couldn't actually de-activate those machines. After some arguing back and forth, they agreed to add another machine to our account (so now we have six machines registered, four with it installed, and two using it concurrently). Now, every time we reformat a machine, we have to call them again because no one remembers to de-register Photoshop before they reformat a user's machine.
iTunes lets you register five computers, and if you hit the limit, de-register them all to start over again. How hard is that?