There was a weird case maybe 10-15 years ago where some digital camcorders had non-commercial licenses for the H.264 video compression patents, and people who were using those cameras for commercial use were getting letters from patent owners saying they needed to buy (expensive) commercial licenses for the patents.

These sorts of things have been a bit screwy for some time. But I also remember when online software activation was limited to expensive commercial software like AutoCAD and MATLAB, and now it's common in the consumer software world. Which doesn't give me confidence this sort of thing will stay in the business-to-business hardware world.