One: there are no cracks for X3: Terran Conflict. So I don't know if he can try a crack....
Two: any fan of the Egosoft games is aware of their policy - Egosoft always removes through a patch the protection from their released games. Sure it takes time, but as Egosoft mentioned, the protection is there just to keep the 0day piracy at bay and to protect the initial sales. After an year or two (depends on vary things), the protection is removed by a patch released by Egosoft. The 2.1 patch was made to mainly add some nice mods done by the gaming community (Egosoft always supported their mod community and always introduced some of the best mods through packs and patches) and to tweak further the game. As there were many complaints with the 1.5 game, many of the fans of the game considering that the patch destroyed any chance for a faster paced game, patches 2.0 and 2.1 were cranked out, both patches being based on the community feedback. Also the US version got out relatively recently (end of April and that version was already updated at 2.0). So updating the protection to protect their sales in US makes perfect sense. I expect that at the end of this year or in first half of 2010 to see Egosoft removing the protection. If you read the official game forums, you will see the statements of Egosoft staff mentioning the protection removal later on in quite a few statements.
The official announcements from Egosoft about the copy protection:
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=216279