Was he actually recycling 28000 PCs? I see regular pointers to sites selling extremely cheap windows/office licenses (price < £10) where they say "this is a genuine licence recylced from a scrapped PC which you can legally transferr to your PC" normally with reference to some court record which they say justifies the legality of this - maybe MS were wanting tol establish a precedent against this being legal and this person just got caught in the crossfirre