I'm guessing the answer is imply that Symantec would face a hailstorm of angry partners and customers if the software suddenly stopped working upon license expiry. If you consider that SEP is an enterprise product, and that enterprises have 1000's of employees, imagine if all of those SEP clients suddenly stopped working perhaps only because the procurrment department was slow on the paperwork?
That's my guess anyway. I've often wondered why SEP doesn't have any obvious license enforcement technologies in it and the only thing I can imagine is that it is such a widely implemented product that if all the software pirates in the world wouldn't come close to matching the sales volume of legitimate customers.
Either that, or the software does license tracking in the background but I have no idea how.
Theory (just for fun):
Symantec has a database that tracks the total # of liicenses sold worldwide. For arguments sake, let's say that number is 250,000,000 licenses.
But their live update servers (as well as customer internal Live Update servers reporting back on # of clients on internal networks) has 275,000,000 per day checking in for updates. Well then that means 25,000,000 client installations are illegal and perhaps they've predetermined that they're willing to accept a certain % of piracy before deciding to re-implement license enforcement into the software itself.
Of course this theory has a lot of holes in it - for example they can't accurately track IP's or whatever since IP's change all the time for any given client or location. Not to mention all the situations where people are using the software for testing but not having downloaded the trial edition (why download a trial edition if you have an identically functional disc already burned but it happened to be a fileconnect download? The software doesn't use license keys so in theory you can use the same disc for every installation you ever do, no matter who owns the license).
Anyway, who knows such things. Either way, we're still obligated to purchase licenses. :)