>business clients, who would are more inclined to spare the expense of purchasing said licenses, since they're not personally buying it themselves, and would want to have support and liability (i.e: Someone to hold liable for problems in said software.)

This is a nice idea but the reality is that there's MANY corporate customers who are happy to get away with casual piracy. Sometimes it's a holdover from when the company was small enough that every business expense is realistically coming out of their own pocket, sometimes they're trying to obfuscate how much their department actually costs to the company at large.

You think individual consumers lie to themselves to justify software piracy? Corporate self-deception is a WHOLE new kettle of fish.

I can tell you that piracy in the corporate world was RAMPANT in the ‘90s. I made a nice sum of money back in the day as a freelance auditor for companies trying to get their legal ducks in a row. Productivity software like Lotus, WordPerfect, Word, Excel were just mass installed off one license because there was no product activation keys or any sort of license validation methods.

Dongles were pretty commonplace on your more expensive software products from mid 90s through the early 00s. If I was publishing software that was a >$1000 a license, I damn sure would have used them.

Even at a simple level, if it's between spending weeks going through purchasing or not asking too many questions and getting on with it. I can see a lot of people choosing option B.