Missed out on the 1 year free a-squared Anti-Malware promo? I have 355 licenses to...

[safeguy]

@Kees

When Ashraf's is giving keys to people who donated to him, then he is certainly not acting as the Robin Hood you try to picture these guys.

What's wrong with giving keys to people who donated to him. It's called donating, not trading or selling. There's a difference. He just appreciates those people who donated to him and since he has some spare keys, he find it appropriate to return the favor by giving some (not all) of his keys to the donators.

Ray may have been doing this in the past and no-one bothered really then, but he has got many imitators now and the sheer numbers of keys privately being re-offered appears to be sky-rocketing. It was not a problem, but it is becoming one now.

No one bothers today too, except for a few. And imitators? Just because there are a few s*ckers out there that imitates doesn't mean you can blame the entire group.

It's unfair to call the entire house diry just because of some tiny spots.

@Alan

If someone was giving away a few things they owned to people and I came by and took it all by telling them a lie they would have me arrested--even if I was planning to give it all to a poor family I knew.

Most companies are not really 'giving' you keys for nothing...they require you to share your email addresses and expect you to be one day a paying customer....and that is the 'hidden cost' behind such freebies. That's why disposable inbox services are created...to reduce spam, etc. If you call that a lie, then it's a lie for a good purpose. As for getting caught, that's a risk every 'grabbers' are willing to take...it's not a big deal as long as we get a chance to help.

The idea behind a promotion is to give a target group of people a sample of your product during a specific time period. If you get hundreds of licenses, and distribute them after the promotion is over you have violated the intent of the promotion. If the vendor had wanted the promotion to go for a longer period of time then he would have extended the offer a few more days, and if he wanted others to act on his behalf and give away license keys then he would have made it possible for them to obtain a large number of keys from the source.

You are talking about violating rights? Come on...some promos only allow you to grab only 1 key for yourself. It's not the number of keys obtained that matters. The fact is most freebies mentioned here are violating some form of rules or terms and conditions by the companies. Some are not meant for the public and some are meant for certain groups of people. Yet, we still discuss about them on this forum. Are you sure you are not violating any rights at all? This is the WWW we are talking about...it's hard for any decent normal user to be following 100% of the 'rules'...some are bound to be broken.

Not too long ago, a few weeks at the most, I remember reading on this forum how Kaspersky had changed a promotion so that people outside of their target zone couldn't get a license key. I also remember reading how a lot of the keys that people had got were blacklisted. So, I know that some companies do blacklist keys

The Kaspersky issue was a totally different thing altogether. People were 'stealing' the keys indeed...that's why they were blacklisted. Yes, true some companies do blacklist keys but it's a rare situation and only applies when such irregularities happen.

A Rose by any other name is still a Rose.

True...but there are nice beautiful roses that smells good and fresh AND ugly
wilted roses that smell bad. There's a clear difference.

[Raymond]

I guess the discussion stops here. Any continuation will turn into a heated argument.
We must always remember that everyone has their own personal opinions.