| OTOH, if I wanted to get around that, I'd install it on a third PC with
| no internet connectivity...

Or with a firewall. I've used a firewall for many years
and don't let anything go out unbidden. I generally
won't even leave anything installed if it tries to go
online without asking. That kind of behavior has
become an epidemic.

Software authors have a right
to be paid for their work, and they have a reasonable
right to try to enforce that, but that doesn't give them
a right to sell spyware. That kind of thing has become
much worse with phones, with people unaware of
what's going online and many phone apps demanding
all sorts of private information for no good reason.