I remember back in my Apple II days, when companies first experimented with copy protection, 2 things happened before most abandoned the idea: 1) users migrate to reduce hassels, intentionally or otherwise 2) the copy protection breakers ("crackers" today, except downsouth, of course) were always more technically advanced than the prtotection. There were special chips and boards for the Apple II that let you defeat copy protection. Often these items made a lot more money than the programs they were designed to liberate. You could even find them in the back of computer magazines.... The fact that there's now a mass of people on the Internet, which various companies are now using to again justify introducing locked software, will not in my not so humble opinion do anything but caause the past to repeat itself. Often, the more locks you put on a thing make it all that more tempting to steal. I don't buy the argument, might not buy the product, we'll see. I lived in a bad part of town for a while in college. I remember one proposal to deal with drug dealers/crack: for some reason that escapes me, "they" wanted was to eliminate pay phones. I think they actually did that in that part of town. This of course made the neighborhood worse in some ways. Lots of poor folks didn't have phones, and were therefore cut off; or, if something happened to yours, you couldn't call the phone co., and, worst, no longer could you run to a phone to call 911. The powers that be were blinded to all these legitimate needs, or their loss somehow seemed a fair price to pay--inconveniencing people widely. What was the impact on the bad guys? Zero, of course. Completely screwy and really the same thing here. You don't solve a problem by encroaching on legitimate users. Strikes me as shortsighted and bad business. I wish CL would get off this tangent and focus on some new gee-whiz features. That's how you defeat pirates, by making a large amount of people want to buy your software, respect your company, and reward your efforts. --Patrick Snazzy Graphics