[notahacker]

According to emails he wrote whilst not trying to defend a court case, it was very, very important to him the disks could not be distinguished from the real thing even though he knew these were far more risky to import than unprinted CDs, and very important to get as many sales as possible. Court submissions seem to indicate he had another line in Canon CDs which he was quite happy encouraging his partner to continue to sell for $30-40 a pop on eBay...

If you read the original court docs, Microsoft also claim the Dell disks normally supplied only to Dell customers allow Windows to be used without activating, and that an active secondary market exists for the real thing because of that.

[Karlozkiller]

Do you have a link to the court documents? This whole thing seems like a mess regardless of who is right. Although I'm quite sure these recovery discs do not allow you to install windows without a license.

They never did when I used such discs back in the days, and why would DELL be allowed to distribute software making such a thing possible? Of course you could argue that he has manipulated the program on the disc but as far as I know that has not been proven and he is claiming he did not.

[notahacker]

Docs are linked to from Microsoft's blog.

They answer your question on the Dell disks, which basically boils down to the convenience of customers unable to reactivate properly for whatever reason, who merely get nag screens. May only have applied to some Dell customer groups and some Windows versions and I'm not about to dig out my old Dell XP reinstallation disk to find out! Presumably they trust that [certain groups of] Dell customers are not buying new computers with bundled Windows versions with the intention of reusing the software on unlicensed older machines, and make enough from selling the OEM licence not to care about the low level of piracy they anticipated as a result.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/uploads/prod/sites/5/2018/04/FIN...