The Poser community is a strong one with strong opinions and though I'm fairly new to it (got Poser about 2-3 months ago), from what I've read in these forums, it sounds like Curious Labs are ones that take great lengths to further the community. In fact, they wanted to honor that community's trust by spending millions to combat piracy, even despite abandoning anti-piracy methods at the community's behalf. So now, all of the sudden, they would turn on the very community that they need just because they want to screw everyone out of $70? Come on.

Don't you see? They are caught between a rock and a hard place. Now I am certainly not for piracy and I bought my copy for the full retail price of $219 (and just bought Pro Pack), but I got to think that someone at the company finally realized that it's not cost effective to prosecute Poser theft on a grand scale. Web sites that put up Poser aren't rich, nor do they make money, and so even though what they are doing is wrong, prosecuting them has no real benefit to the company. Sure, the guy goes to jail and CL is out the court costs. Taking down single users is hardly effective as it would cost more than $219 to do so.

The point here is that they had 3 choices as a company from what I can see from their reply:

1> They could keep doing business the way they are until their operating losses finish what's left of their assets and there is no more Poser or no more CL.

2> They can put it on sale to make the community happy about their previous purchases (which still wouldn't make most happy because they could have got it $90 cheaper now) and risk getting sued by every distributor until they were sucked dry in court.

3> Or they can try to raise money to use to further along their business and hopefully Poser 5. I'll admit the wording is unfortunate, but obviously necessary to avoid getting sued. In such a case, they can't just make one public comment that has the wording required and then under the table tell people "Oh it's really not that, it's this..." First time one of their distributors hears that, they are back to 2.

This is a legal game they are finding it necessary to play in order to survive. To me, they've made every effort they could to try to get people to read between the lines without saying it, even going as far as to offer a "coupon" serial number, but everyone is too quick to jump down their throats.

So the question is, do you want CL to survive or do you want to lose them and maybe their product over poor but forced wording? This PR nightmare will fade away, but better that than CL...

No, I don't work for CL, just an artist and a member of the Poser community like everyone else.