Okay, a litle blunt reality: I've stayed away from this thread, for a few reasons, the biggest of which is that no one's said anything really new about this stuff, save that it's a bad thing to steal, which we all know already. That should be a given by now, right? Even though a thread asking "where can I get Poser for free" is locked, you can bet that the asker has already gotten an IM from someone telling him/her exactly what he wants to know. Seventy thousand people are members here, folks, and we certainly can't assume that they all have elevated senses of morality and integrity. My housemate here uses Morpheus to test drive music before he buys it. He's always complaining about the lousy quality of the downloads (and he's right in that regard) but he does get to hear them before he spends the twenty bucks on the CD. I have no issue with that, because I know he deletes the files right after listening. Mike has extremely high standards when it comes to music and sound. For a lark last night, I put daz, zygote, and poser in the search engine and started downloading whatever would come through. By this morning, I had over fifty files sequestered away, everything from Mike 2 to Sacred Spaces, all of it arriving virus free and ready for installation. It was frighteningly neat, clean, and easy. They've all been deleted, but the simple fact remains: the stuff is out there, and it ain't coming back. No, we can't control warez, no matter how we try. It's an unfortunate fact of life. I think all we can do is accept that some people are gonna try to steal whatever they can when the opportunity affords itself; that's been an essential truth of humankind since Adam and Eve, and it ain't gonna change because we want it to. But what we can do is monitor things a little better. Yes, it means we sometimes run into unfortunately ugly situations, but I don't know of any other way myself. And just as side note to the students: I agree with you. Academic versions of software used to be heavily discounted because it couldn't be upgraded -- it was "one time use", so to speak. The manufacturers have now turned their backs on the students and raised the price of academic software to the point where it's almost as expensive as the "real world" version.... and that's a hideous shame. We want our kids to know how to run everything from Quark to Dreamweaver in order to get a job, and we don't allow them the means to properly learn it because we make it so expensive that it becomes prohibitive. I have no sympathy for the software manufacturers on this; they are exploiting a captive audience for little more than greed.