<i>Licensing servers are not DRM.</i><p>Having the tool ping a server every week doesn&#x27;t make the tool any harder to crack, and cracked versions obviously don&#x27;t ping the server, so there&#x27;s no reason whatever to be draconian about what happens when the check doesn&#x27;t go through.<p>At least that&#x27;s the approach they took at Adobe. IIRC the tool worked normally for up to a month without pinging the server, and after that showed warnings but kept working for a while. The times may have changed but idea was to err as far as possible on the side of lenience, because anyone using a version that pings the server is by definition a paying customer and not a pirate.