Abandonware is deadware. If there is no longer any support for it, and you did not take legal and appropriate steps to insure that you had continuous use for it before the company died, then too bad; life sucks that way. Will you get punished for running a cracked bit of software that came from a now-dead company? Prolly not. Is it therefore ethical? Definately not, unless you bought the rights to do so from that defunct company. Don't like it? Then choose to spend your money on software that guarantees your right to continuous usage (and perhaps eve modification) even if the company who wrote it dies. You collectively determine the market - just that most consumers are too resigned to "the way it is" to realize that fact. Many in this thread act as if you have a right to the use and manipulation of the software you buy. Thing is, you don't, unless the software author gives you that right. That's exactly why I prefer Linux and Open Source software (even if it runs under Windows) whenever and wherever I can find it, because I am guaranteed those rights from the get-go. If Red Hat or Sun or whomever dies, the GPL and other licenses like it guarantee that I can do what I want or need to insure that my copy of software still runs just fine, even allowing me to upgrade it or to iron out bugs myself if needed. For isntance, I use GIMP because I know that unlike Photoshop, I can do pretty much the same things for post-work, and if gimp.org died tomorrow, so what? I have the source code right here, and can do pretty much whatever I want to with it if its for my own use. The whole question is moot point though, because the latest Service Release from Curious Labs disables the hardware registration scheme entirely - all you need is a valid serial number. If you crack Poser 5 now, you are warezing/pirating/etc, since there would not be a need to do so, even if Steve Cooper and Larry Weinburg both died two minutes ago and Curious Labs got sucked up by a freak tornado. /P