Yeah at one of my old jobs in IT, Microsoft would perform software license audits just after a new release of Office. They would find that we were in deficit and then force us to buy licenses but the only licenses we could buy were the new versions of Office. Of course then we would have to upgrade all the other ones that had the licenses. This happens every few years. Obviously it was our fault for not doing better license allocation but I feel like Microsoft knew this is common and took advantage of it.

Back in the Zortech days, we didn't install any copy protection mechanism for just this reason. (Also, copy protection annoys people, and annoying our customers was not something we wished to do.)

That also meant we had no idea how many copies were pirated.