With Vista, Volume licensing now works in another way, requireing a local activation server for companies each 180 days, or single activation using Microsoft servers..
As this news story states, apparently all security can be broken, as some people seem to already have found a way to circumvent the official channels and register Vista without having an official key...
Maybe things like licensing should be dealt with in an entirely different way.. so that actually buying the stuff becomes more interesting for people than trying to get around it. Compare it to iTunes, which became popular because people could obtain things easily and for a relatively low price. Maybe such a system can be thought up for other kinds of software too...