Ron, (geez, starting to feel like I have a split personality complex) I have every belief that there were a number of people in this community who decided to gip CL out of a paycheck. I keep my eyes open, and I've seen a few posts about certain people being involved in illegal activites here (as in within the community) The fact remains that the greatest percentage of Warez distribution occurs through warez distribution websites, forums, and those sites get it directly from the crackers via IRC. I haven't made an attempt to do a search in IRC channels as I don't have the time nor the patience to sit in chat room after chat room, asking people if they have PPP, especially when I have no idea how to report them when it occurs in an IRC environment. My simple experience has shown me that there wasn't quite as many copies of poser Pro floating around the net as CL suggests, and posts I've seen here have proved to me that the bug reports may have had a huge factor in the sales dropping. Sales don't drop at rates like that due to warez distribution, I can't recall a single case in history that showed evidence of such a thing... and if this is truly the case with PPP, then why wasn't it all over CNET, MSNBC and CNN, in a report about how hazardous hackers are becoming to company revenues and electronic product sales? I would think that even hearing a whisper, they'd all be all over that. Why? Because telling people that something is a ajor threat gets ratings and gets traffic. Scaring people brings more people glued to their television watching CNN then anything else does. Granted, it wouldn't have been a long article, I don't assume, but I'm certain I would've read it in my CNET newsletter. I have no doubts that PPP was distributed over the net, jsut as any software is. I do doubt, however, that it was that massive that it caused that amount of downfall in sales, especially when the timing of their sales dip seems to concur with the same time these forums and other were flooded with messages complaining about the bugs in PPP. To quote someone's post from earlier (Please forgive me):> I can't afford the Pro Pack, and I've been watching the posts about problems with it. I'm probably sticking with Poser 4 for quite a while.

This basically concurs with my arguement, and I go through the archives of these forums showing probably hundreds of postings saying the same thing. That is what I believe caused the sales dip, not a few people emailing PPP to each other. That's not to say that Warez isn't a threat. I just don't think it contributed as much to their losses as they believe. Somehow I don't think you read all of my post, and only acknowledged my mention of warez. If so, you'd have gotten my point already.