Microsoft would have experience with that
30 years on and still unwilling to name the actual companies involved. I get that discretion is a thing but this feels like how history becomes folklore.
And nowadays we have
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36See also Sega v Accolade.
Sega had implemented a measure to discourage unlicensed games for the Genesis/Megadrive. Upon boot, the console would ensure that the string "SEGA" was present at a certain memory location and then display that string as part of a longer message to the user asserting that the game was produced under license from [string]. The idea was that circumventing this would constitute trademark infringement.
Accolade reverse engineered and circumvented it. Sega sued for trademark infringement. Accolade eventually won. The whole thing only harmed consumers since by the time Sega implemented the measure there were already a bunch of games, both licensed and unlicensed, that did not pass the check.
Dell and HP did similar, albeit slightly more complicated, checks for windows licensing back in the 2000’s on their Windows installation media.
I can’t imagine the work required to get plug and play going on on old isa hardware. That 95 team was pretty awesome.
Expected this to be about LLMs. Soon it will be, since negation is a hard concept to comprehend for humans, too?
Along similar lines, the Sega Genesis required games to trigger a routine in the console to show "Produced by or under license from Sega Enterprises LTD." at bootup time, attempting to use trademark law to force game publishers to pay for a license from Sega to build games for the console. The court ruled that copying the code to trigger the message was not copyright infringement and the message itself was not trademark infringement because Sega's own design forced those things to make the hardware work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade