No, I'm pretty sure that's not true at all. Even if they are running a
pirated version they can still update their browsers.
Not sure about Internet Explorer 8, but as of October 2007, you don't need a genuine copy of Windows XP to move from IE6 to IE7. [1]
I'm not sure when they made this change, but it appears that you may also download IE8 without having a genuine copy of Windows these days [2].
[1] https://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2007/10/04/internet-explorer-7-update.as px?Redirected=true [2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=43