greens :
Boosted, that is a slippery slope argument... I'm all for obeying the rules and not promoting the sites - but to say they are stolen and comparing them to a street criminal is pretty shady.
Is it shady to go to Burundi or the Republic of Congo and buy full, legit copies of windows for pennies? Windows is priced cheaply there because their people cannot afford it. It is shady, but not as bad as you say. The copies are accounted for and i have never had a deactivation, ever. I have never heard of a deactivation, ever. And if i did - these are reputable sites with their names on the line - they will make it right even if things do go wrong.
Are they a microsoft certified resaler......NO. Thus they are are not legitamate.
And to answer your question, YES actually it is shady and illegal to go to those places in africa and then resale it to people in USA/Eurpoe, you might want to do some research on international commerce.
If you have never heard of a key-store key being deactivated then you have not looked very hard on this fourm or anywhere on the interent.
Most of these sites get keys that are slotted for MSDN and corporate subscriptions in the hopes that that specific key is never activated. In a large corporate environment you have hundreds of computers imaged off of the same windows key, which is completley fine as long as each computer has a paid for license for its own unique key. This is exactly what Dell and all the other OEMs do. They all ship with the same Dell license key, but each computer has its own license as well.
Thus these sites are banking on the fact that the PC will never be activated with its own unique key vs the key used to image all of the computers.