IP Law and Third Party Software Licencing usage in IT orginzations

Today, I had an interesting conversation about intellectual property law and third party software licencing usage in IT shops. An IT shop purchases a third party software product with a developer licence which means you can only use this software in a non-production/commercial server. If the IT shop decides to use this software on their production/commercial server without buying a commercial licence, then the company can be liable for patent infringement. Has anyone experience this before? Please share, I'm interested in hearing your comments.