So, one would say this system works, but legality of the licenses is questionable. We went to Settings -> Update & Security -> Activation – > Enter Product Key and copy/pasted our Windows 10 Professional license keys there.Īfter a couple of seconds, Windows 10 connected to Microsoft servers and verified our keys as valid and voilà – Windows was activated for less than $5, quite different from $90 which is what Microsoft sells it for.īoth machines were activated and working… Keys arrived via eBay message system within two hours.

We are not lawyers and this text isn’t legal advice on Windows 10 product licensing.įor the purpose of this article we downloaded Windows 10 from Microsoft website, installed it on two machines and went straight to eBay where we bought two Windows 10 Professional licenses from two random sellers.

These license keys are exploiting Microsoft licensing rules, and are sort of piracy. Everyone wonders, do these keys work and are those legit? The answer is, they do work, but are not the legitimate Windows license keys. No one else can tell you what is Ethically right for you.Recently, there has been a surge of very cheap Microsoft Windows 10 license keys on eBay, Amazon and other online stores. Tho even that doesn't really matter, 'cause how often do you need to do that anyways?Īs far as whether you want to get a Windows key that way or not? That's for you to decide if it fits within your ethics or not. So none of you will be able to get official Microsoft help or whatever, that specifically requires key-verification or whatever, since none of you legit have that key registered to you. You'll be sold a key that's also getting sold to dozens of other people, potentially. Just means they aren't acquired legitimately (by you) and they most definitely aren't just 'unique for you' keys. So not necessarily black market, but not 100% legit either. So this 'cheap window's key' market is part of what they call the 'Grey Market'. So if i sell for $5 or $10 it's still higher than the $0 i spent to sell the windows keys/installs i stole from other people.Įdit: Never considered Snapjak's suggestion of how they are enterprise keys, but that's very likely too! And probably makes it even more cost effective for the seller to sell the grey market keys that way. Why do i care how much i get for it, anything is better than nothing as these are keys i didn't even pay for. I am selling *random people's* windows keys/installs. It's fine to me if i sell it cheap, because why do i care about getting full price, it's already a copy i paid for, i'm just getting some of my money back. i am allowed to have like X number of installs with it. Because people are selling their own keys.

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