[tverbeure]

Back in the nineties, 3D Studio used to be pirated by every kid in their dorm and more. The software had license checks all over the place apparently, but crackers tried to remove all of them.

However, if they missed one, it would move a random vertex by some random amount which is obviously very visible when rendering a 3D scene.

When people complained about this on forums (usenet mostly), they outed themselves for using pirated software.

[grujicd]

You should be 100% sure that such code never ever gets executed by legitimate user. As seen above, it doesn't have to be a bug in licensing code, it could be something external.

[LorenPechtel]

Yup. Long ago, join an online Command and Conquer game. Boom, everything blows up. Piracy watchdog that reacted to my repairing Windows and not realizing I needed to reinstall the game after that.