That reminds of the days that I was incorporated, and really wanted to be completely legit. I bought Office 95 Pro for half price, with CD's in a jewel case, complete with holograms on the labels, and considered myself a careful shopper. Then the company I worked for entered into a Select Agreement, and we had a meeting with an official Microsoft representative. I asked him why licenses on the Select schedule were so much more expensive than my copy of Office, and he told me that my copy was bogus. I told him about the holograms and everything! Nope. I paid $200 for very, very good, completely fraudulent and illegal fakes.
After that, I went to Linux on the desktop, and never gave Microsoft another dime, until my wife demanded Word on her Mac a couple years ago, and I now begrudgingly have an Office365 account.
I bought office 2000 as a student for a tenner :) No holograms but it was official.
I've never paid for it since. Office apps aren't really important in my personal life at all, the open ones do just fine if I ever need them for something. And if I need the real office I just use my work laptop :P
I've been researching this and the sellers of this assert they are selling licenses that are left over and entirely legitimate. It's a secondary market, not unlike used cars or anything else that is more tangible. I think there might be precedent for this to be legal even if Microsoft wouldn't like it be so.
It's illegal. Software is licensed, not sold; and software licenses are usually nontransferable. This was a point of contention in Vernor v. Autodesk wherein the 9th Circuit found for Autodesk.
In the United States, you are right. In the EU, that is wrong. See for example: [0]
The reason you can get entirely legal windows licenses for so cheap is that there are many institutional buyers who get the licenses they actually use separately but still purchase a lot of computers that have OEM licenses bundled [1], and now they all unload those licenses at whatever price the market will bear. Last year, that was ~6€, this year it's down to ~3€.
The fact that the prices is now so low is probably a part of why it keeps going down. A lot of people in this thread express suprise that a legit key could be so cheap so they obviously must be illegal, which drives away sales.
They send you a license key that you can use with a legit Windows installer, that you get on Microsoft’s website. You can even link all that to your Microsoft’s account.
If that’s pirated software, Microsoft doesn’t try to detect it very much.
I bought Pro at around $45 and activated through Microsofts own activation service so while $3 sounds unreasonably low, unless Microsoft has started activating unlicensed keys it is possible to get actual legal keys at a fraction of the list price.
These are likely licenses given to Microsoft Partners which are only to be used for developing/testing software. They activate identically to regular keys and there is no indication once activated that that's the only licensed purpose of that key.
However there is a license recycling market that buy up unused or reassignable licenses from say software shops that have gone under and still have 100 visual studio licenses etc
Microsoft never bothers, and at 3 euro the risk you have that "activate windows" might have a low chance of popping up again is well worth it. Just make sure its not a volume license key and your pretty much good to go.
Is it really pirating when all you get is a key and a legal inactivated copy of windows from MSFT's servers says it's legit?
I bought an OEM pro key for $15-20, and it works great.
Research it a bit more and if you call MSFT support, they go into a loop about how if you typed it in and windows says it's good, it's a legit key from their perspective.
