Glad you brought Lightwave up. It's pirated all over the net, and in your own words look where Newtek is, gee how'd that happen??? (I bought Lightwave and will again). Casual copying doesn't affect me at all. Nobody I know cares about graphics software, I'm floating all alone in my own sea. Nobody I know even cares about computers. So much for that insinuation. (I'm posting from the United States where in theory anyway, we have freedom of speech and innocent until proven guilty and blah blah blah). The point I'm to make to you (and of course, the unseen millions g) is that software protection schemes do not stop anything, only make it more inconvenient for the people who do pay for the software, and create a few jobs along the line (which possibly is the driving factor). I will buy Lightwave upgrades (and hopefully it'll be the only dongle I ever have to deal with). If it was my product do you really think I'd care if it were pirated...hell I'd be flattered. I'm glad you so willingly accept paying money for products that do not perform...it rather upsets me (I have to work for mine...at a day job). I'm glad you have time to burn calling and getting serial numbers everytime you reformat or build a new machine. Kind of gets on my nerves because I have a time schedule and do this in my "spare" time. Let's do talk about honesty here. Do you really think that when buggy software is released it comes as a suprise to all? When someone takes someone's money and hands them a product that they KNOW won't perform (even if the patch is in the works) that's pretty dishonest don't you think? Or is this honesty we're discussing here relegated to certain societal classes? i.e., the "buyers" I paid $300 for WIN2K and it won't install or run with 1GIG of RAM on my machine (768MB is ok though). Linux had no problem (thought I'd beat you to the "it's your machine" argument...Linux runs pretty close to hardware). I'd like to do a study of the financial growth of software companies and graph it vs. the amount of pirating of their software. I suspect it's a directly proportional relationship but I'm not that interested and it's a hell of a job, and not something I'd undertake just to prove a point that nobody would pay attention to anyhow. This whole discussion is for naught because it doesn't matter what I think or say because they'll do it anyway and I'm not buying anymore dongle crap...my mobo will develop varicrose veins with all these freaking dongles hanging off of it.