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Comment by simfoo | Hacker News Reader

There are no legitimate Windows licenses that only cost 10€. They may activate but successful activation does not imply that you are not breaching Microsofts license agreement and they may decide to deactivate those licenses at any time

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Wasn't the ban on resale of licenses declared illegal at least in some countries? In that case, second hand licenses would very well be legal, even if Microsoft doesn't like them.

I don't know, but I would be surprised if such a ruling applied to licenses that were never intended for the country they are resold in.

Those licenses are mostly from education institutions or from company MSDN subscription. I.e. from rogue IT admins that abuse their power.

it is illegal in Poland

It is 100% legal in Poland and rest of EU. Oracle vs Usedsoft http://www.osborneclarke.com/insights/the-end-of-the-usedsof...

yet on polish amazon (allegro) they do nothing :)

This seems like ebay's problem. Why are they not shut down for this? If I came across some software on e-bay, I'd assume it was legit. I just checked ebay and it is full of windows keys. How am I, as a consumer, supposed to know that this is 'illegal'?

Commenting as a reaction would help more than just downvoting of course, because I am still not seeing how, as a consumer, I am supposed to know that those are illegal keys. Other platforms that facilitate fraud on this scale are always forced to take action, yet ebay gets away with it. I am wondering why that is.

The same way you're supposed to know if a bike is stolen. If the given market is grey/shady and the price is excessively low, and you really want to know, you ask (for starters).

If everyone got a "free" bike when you bought a computer then the people who didn't want to use their's and so bothered to sell it would probably sell it for $10 or so?

You can get £20 books for 50p, because either the person has finished using the book, and there are lots of books; or because the person got the book free (as a gift generally) and didn't really want it; or because they bought a copy and got a second copy gifted, etc.

Software isn’t a bike. It might be a special deal Microsoft has with those vendors. Bikes have an intrinsic minimal cost, like materials and shipping, software keys don’t. The average consumer would probably regard windows as something that is free to begin with so seeing it for sale for $10 probably won’t strike them as strange, you get it “free” with your computer after all.

Furthermore, this is not one vendor selling one ‘stolen’ item, it is many, selling many keys. This makes it seems like a legitimate channel for keys to the average consumer. It also makes eBay more responsible if you ask me. It seems to me as if they are making a profit from those sales. If they truly are illegal keys then they should probably do something about it.

So why am I wrong here?

You could apply the same low price is stolen goods argument during black Friday too.

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