Microsoft might decide that it’s not worth cracking down on small-fry customers who bought a product in good faith. Do you feel lucky? It’s possible these products will work forever. The glass-half-empty types in the audience know that Microsoft can revoke your activation rights at any time. Trust me: You do not want to be the defendant in a civil suit with Microsoft alleging that you’re using improperly licensed software.īut on a personal PC or Mac, the risk that the Microsoft License Police will show up at your door is about as close to zero as it gets. No fancy Google fu required.) What could go wrong?Īre you the glass-half-full type? If so, you could look at my experience and say, “It’ll probably work, so what do I have to lose?” I might try to talk you out of that if you’re trying to buy software for your business, especially if you have any disgruntled former employees who might call Microsoft’s piracy hotline and rat you out. (If you’re really intent on doing this, by the way, you can track down one of these product key resellers directly, cutting out the publisher and the e-commerce intermediary and chopping the price in half. StackCommerce and their publisher partners get a generous cut of each sale, and in a media marketplace where publishers are struggling to find revenue, it’s an irresistible pitch. I’ve seen these offers on some very big sites, names you would recognize instantly. In this case, the actual seller goes by the name “nerdused,” but lately I’ve seen identical offers from a company called “Definitive Lab.”īecause the deal is offered under the imprimatur of a trusted publisher, often with a by-lined article from the publication’s “deals editor,” you’re much more likely to trust it. StackCommerce acts as a broker between well-known publishers and unknown sellers. You probably wouldn’t consider giving your credit card information to a shady-looking website, which is why this particular offer is so interesting. But the software should work as expected, and if you aren’t bothered about the technical details of license agreements then that might be all that matters to you. I repeat: If you buy one of these product keys, you don’t have a valid license, as far as Microsoft is concerned. And it would be trivially easy for an ethically challenged IT person in a large corporation to copy some unused license keys and sell them to someone who would in turn resell them on one of these e-commerce sites.) (Some Visual Studio subscriptions, for example, come with a passel of license keys intended for evaluation purposes. This outfit is selling “gray market” product keys that are harvested from a variety of sources and aren’t authorized for resale. disclaims proprietary interest in the marks and names of others.Let’s make something clear right up front: If you pay for one of these offers, you are not buying a license. Other trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming marks and names or their products. While all efforts are made to check pricing and other errors, inadvertent errors do occur from time to time and Dell reserves the right to decline orders arising from such errors. and other countries.ĭELL'S NORMAL TERMS AND CONDITIONS APPLY AND ARE AVAILABLE ONLINE OR UPON REQUEST. © 2022 NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, GeForce, GeForce RTX, GeForce MAX-Q, GRID, SHIELD, Battery Boost, CUDA, FXAA, GameStream, G-Sync, NVLINK, ShadowPlay, SLI, TXAA, PhysX, GeForce Experience, GeForce NOW, Maxwell, Pascal and Turing are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. Energy, Climate Action & SustainabilityĬeleron, Intel, the Intel logo, Intel Atom, Intel Core, Intel Inside, the Intel Inside logo, Intel vPro, Intel Evo, Intel Optane, Intel Xeon Phi, Iris, Itanium, MAX, Pentium, and Xeon are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries.APEX Data Storage Services Backup Target.
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