Microsoft has faced this issue with Windows licensing. I would say that it was noticeable with Windows XP.

If Windows was licensed to a particular hardware computer, how would you define that computer? Being a common practice to upgrade RAM, disks, PCI cards, and even CPUs, and Windows could enumerate every component on each boot, how much different would a computer need to be, before the Windows license is invalid?

And people were tripped up by this, after replacing their motherboard. Windows had a threshold of changes where it would balk and demand reactivation.