In the forums before release Emotiv changed their pricing (reduced) for raw sensor access, but they still wanted to get paid for it, which most of the users strongly disagreed with them on, as the idea of limiting the hardware's usability like that leaves a sour taste to poor programmers who want to experiment and help develop, and therefore drive, the technology.

I would suspect that, while Emotiv would prefer people to purchase the license to access these features legitimately, ultimately it serves their ends to help popularize their product and get interesting things developed for it so I would expect that it isn't entirely frowned upon.