Before I was a web designer, I made a pretty good living as an embroidery digitizer. In case you weren't aware, we're the CAD geeks who get your company's logo and 'punch' the design into the computer, paying careful attention to how the design is to be stitched out, what kind of fabric it's going on, and what has to be lost from the original logo to make the design work. It's a small and hugely competitive field, divided between mom & pop local embroiderers and companies with multinational operations; I've worked for both. The two major players in this software arena are Wilcom and Gunold-Stickma, which were the first on the scene in the early 80s. Both of them started out with hardware dongles (a "Trysoft" card in Wilcom's case) and registration codes which expired every 18 months. This meant making a call to our distributor in Colorado, Melco, who in turn had to make a call to Wilcom, which is an Australian company and therefore closed and asleep when we're working. More recent versions of the software have no dongle but instead codes which expire every 6 months for 3 times and then you receive the final code. This was largely because their competitor, Gunold-Stickma, was moving in this direction and their users were unhappy with losing a day's worth of work each time the software went south. As I mentioned earlier, the embroidery software market is very small. What I didn't mention was that the software costs about thirty thousand dollars. Limited application, small market, and a price which reflects how small that market is and how much it takes to keep the software divisions in the black. Steve, I'd ask you exactly how close to this profile CL is. As small as CL could be, you probably sell at least ten times as many licenses per year as Wilcom does. Be square with us: does CL have actual statistics which indicate that sales drop when cracked/warez versions of Poser are posted to the Internet? The other irony here is that Poser, like the Wilcom software, is not a video game and has a somewhat steep learning curve (moreso without the manual, you'll agree). I can see the average warez d00d using a cracked copy of Microsoft Word or Quake; Poser is an art tool which demands weeks and months of use to attain proficiency. Does CL really believe that there are enough warez d00dz out there who have the patience to master this application (i.e., constitute an actual lost sale)? Without insulting your UI team, Poser isn't in the same league as Photoshop when it comes to using it without reading the manual. And I think you'll agree that as useful as these forums are, they won't fill the void left when a d00d tries to figure out the program without the manual. Here's an alternate solution you might like to consider. Every so often the software on startup pops the following dialog: "Please enter the **th word of the th paragraph on page *** of the manual. [box] Please enter the code you were emailed on (date). [box] Otherwise, please contact customer support at -- and have your registration code ready." Will hackers get around this? Probably, but no more or less easily than the protection scheme you propose. Will it make a sizeable dent in your sales? Check your sales stats regarding P4 and Pro Pack. Will it alienate the user base? No. If CL (GOD FORBID) goes under and egi.sys decides not to further support the software, egi.sys releases a final code or software patch which permanently unlocks the software. Piracy is a nonissue for dead software.