With Beyond, you could go the way of RSA key generator - paired to unique ID's and MAC ID's of the DAC. RSA cost about 40 USD per pop when bought in bulk of eg. 250 pieces. And breaking - programming - including RSA key by fake chinese sellers would be another HUGE obstacle. Sure, RSA's been breached, but it is still tons of work for hacker to get through. However that won't work for QS, sadly. If this was 20 years back, you could use the ancient PC game way where the users had to type in random sequence of words from the manual, good times
The only thing, that will always make the difference of Legal vs Pirated software, is real support and feature updates. As long as the ID database is good and it is clear who has fake and who has real, then providing some extra after-sales support could help more (pre-recorded live-streamed training, workshop, what-not). Just throwing out some ideas that we use with our software. Naturally Internet-always-on license report-tracking and Salesforce/SAP business tracking is probably out of question, I presume.
My kit: Mamba Elements V3 & DAC, ILD SOS & LaserCam, LaserDock DAC, Kvant Clubmax 1800 (2017)