I feel I have to post here for one reason only. I think I was the one the brought up the scenario of CL possibly going out of business sometime in the future. Face it, no one wants to believe they will but nearly all companies do at one point or another. I'm glad to know that there is some plan in place to handle this situation if it ever occures, not having the details on this plan is good as it shouldn't really be discussed or released until such a time as it is needed. As for this kind of copy protection in general; it wouldn't be a problem if it really did stop piracy as was mentioned earlier in this post. Keep in mind that under the hood this is nothing more than a function call, usually returning either a 1 or 0. A small edit to this can force that call to always return 1 and pass a registration regardless of the number entered. With this in mind, the protection isn't any different from any other registration scheme. A cracker only needs to force a pass on this one function whether it be a challenge-response, straight serial number or hardware checking form of copy protection. It doesn't make it harder for the crackers to pirate, it only makes it more obvious to the paying customer and a bit more inconveniant. Now with all that said, I will add one more thing here that might put it all in perspective: "Locks are only there to keep honest people honest."