Blame the minor inconvenience of re-licensing on pirates that don't want to pay for the software or the improvements (including the ability to save program customization).
Well, it would be more accurate to blame it on the response of a company concerned about the very speculative losses from piracy.
I've written about this at great length in the past, arguing that so-called software piracy could quite possibly be improving actual sales and that efforts to repress piracy, if successful, may actually harm sales. This is not at all an argument in favor of piracy, or, to use a less loaded term, unlicensed use of a software product, in violation of copyright. "Piracy" implies an actual and tangible loss, which does not take place with ordinary unlicensed use.
However, where pirates -- the term becomes appropriate here -- sell a product to users who then have paid for it and might even imagine it is lawul, there is a more solid argument in favor that the software company suffers an actual loss.
The calculations of huge losses from software piracy that we so often see are simply created by multiplying the estimated number of unlicensed users by the cost of a license; but this vastly overstates the true cost in two ways: first of all, many and quite likely most, perhaps even the vast majority of those unlicensed users, would not have purchased the license if no option of unlicensed use existed.
Secondly, there is definitely an effect where unlicensed users become motivated to purchase a license. For example, if an individual were to start using Protel as a garage engineer, and becomes familiar with the program, that engineer, when the company becomes sucessful, or the engineer later comes to work at a company that needs to make a CAD purchase choice, will be very likely to recommend Protel. Retraining cost can be huge!
So it is entirely possible that efforts to stamp out software piracy harm the software industry more than piracy harms it. Because the true piracy, sale of unlicensed software, is much more easy to find and prosecute, I'd suggest that copyright protection efforts be directed there rather than at preventing ordinary users from, shall we say, running an extended demo. It could be cutting of your nose to spite your face.
(Protel, I think, offers student discounts, which are another way to allow users without major resources to get into the program, but for some students, even a few hundred dollars is a big deal.)
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