It may seem strange after reading my other post in this thread, but in balance, I agree with you.
The contrary position is that of the big picture, i.e. that active malware on some systems affects the rest of us as well. Most email is spam, most spam is sent through infected PCs, and these can be sending out malware as well - therefore, so the argument goes, it's important to protect all PCs, not just those running properly licensed software.
Even corporates get this, in an age of consumer broadband. Infected consumer PCs can be used as hackers' cat's paws, or be ganged up to mount DDoS attacks.
However, I agree with you that it's not unreasonable to limit access to onging expenditure to those who have paid for that support. Maintaining an antivirus is an ongoing committment, both in development and bandwidth terms, and the latter load scales up with the number of systems consuming the service.
Unless you're prepared to accept the vendor bumping some of that hosting load onto everyone else's systems - as some vendors already do, via stealthed torrent clients - Microsoft is going to be spending money on that hosting. It could be seen as unreasonable to expect them to cater for those who have already broken trust by breaking license terms.
I think we need to know more about how the "cloud" features in all this - in case that's a euphamism for exactly that kind of customer-resourced load balancing.
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