"If I am correct, the Right Hemisphere software lock is done by another company, so I would imagine a contract of some sort is already in place." I hope that for CL's sake this hypothetical contract includes a hefty refund to CL if CL can demonstrate that a working crack to the protection scheme is extant within a set period of release of the PPP bug fix. If it doesn't, then the vendor of the protection scheme has done a sweet marketing job on CL, based on Steve's hopeful expectations for the protection for PPP that he has voiced here. Well, time (not a very long a period of time) will tell. On a side note; Discreet used a hardware dongle system for 3DSMax 3 and switched to a software lock system for Max 4. The reason I heard was that they had so much hassle (and cost) in helping out legitimate users having problems with the drivers for the dongle not working. This was one case of inconvenience to users outweighing the extra security of a hardware lock.