Okay, still a bad analogy as the fruit stand clearly states you free to take this fruit without payment and evaluate it, but if you want to eat more than a bite you have to pay us or throw it away.

Clearly you have a pedantic streak, but you’d be very hard pressed legally to find anyone saying you’ve broke the law by downloading an iso that is freely available online nor would any DMCA requests or the like be filled. Furthermore, casual downloaders who do not distribute or attempt to profit off of pirating windows are rarely if ever prosecuted.

Also, like what are you doing? Are you just trying to be right or is there some underlining principal I’m missing? Is it just piracy=illegal=bad?

Okay, so it’s not illegal to obtain the ISO as you said before, and you’re not breaking DRM, your breaking TOS. Yes, this is generally regarded as piracy and illegal, but downloading the ISO is not. Your analogy only works if the fruit stand has infinite fruit being cloned over and over again from the same original fruit automatically and costs the fruit stand practically nothing when you don’t pay.

We’re talking about Windows ltsc aren’t we? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/download-windows-11-iot-enterprise-ltsc-eval the ISO is freely available on Microsofts website.

I thought activation scripts were somewhat of a grey area legally?