dmtyler wrote: FWIW, Max 4.0 and Character Studio 3 also incorporate a "software lock" in lieu of the hardware lock that was used in Max 3 and earlier. Looks as though software locks are the wave of the future. That could be why I haven't heard of FWIW etc. Whatever the initials "FWIW" stand for. It seems that this sort of software lock is merely a fashion which is going round, and CL should resist the temptation to follow the herd. Software locks might be semi-OK for very expensive work-type packages of which not many are bought and all their users are office businesses and are on the internet. But not for Poser. It is easy for people who are on the internet to forget that not everybody is, same as people in England suffer nuisance and inconvenience from the common planners' delusion that everybody has a car. What is someone without a WWW link to do, when he buys a package, say Qwerty? He phones Zxcvbnm Ltd/Inc/Gmbh who wrote it. That from some countries is slow and expensive and the phone line is bad. He gets "call later" and answering machines and checkups and busy tone etc. He writes a letter in the snail mail and after a fortnight he hasn't got an answer, due to distance and overseas-ness or Zxcvbnm's office being busy. Zxcvbnm wants this and that as checkup on his bona-fides. In the end he feels himself forced to get a warez copy via a friend of his who is on the internet. And that warez copy is the hacked version without the software lock. In comes the "law of diminishing returns", same as with book libraries: The library puts in a photocopy machine so that people won't have to steal books or razor pages out of books. OK for a while. Then someone in charge cets authority-minded and puts more and more checkups and hassle round the photocopier to stop illegal copying, until it gets to be so much hassle that people go back to stealing books and razoring pages out of books. I am sorry to take up so much space here. I admore CL for all their work writing such a useful package as Poser, but PLEASE forget this fancy new idea about a software lock and keep the present registration system. And note Snazzy's experience with Vbox (see message 104).

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And it could be that sometimes, someone finds package Qwerty as warez, gets it because it is cheap and he didn't feel interested enough at hhe time to fork out for a legitimate copy, finds it useful, but not as useful as it could be because he hasn't got its manual, so he buys the next edition of Qwerty legitimately despite the extra cost.