If I may be a bit hard, I would say that one should follow the first rule of conflict management: "Never, ever let an unwanted action get the desired result.". I know a lot of people in the hacker/pirate scene, and there is a code of honor among them. One of the things you can be sure of is that the more invasive the copy protection, the more they will try to crack it. Software that relies on trust and honor will be less copied (I once bought a prog that only required me to give my word of honor that I would not spread it. I never spread it.). The bottom line is that if you do not like invasive copy protection, make sure it is ineffective, but also make sure you pay for programs that behave. Companies has to learn that it is bad business to harass or snoop on customers. Show them that the pain threshold has been reached. It is a matter of positive and negative feedback. Someone mentioned firewalls. Don't make the mistake of thinking that they are a bullet proof protection. They block traffic based on port and protocol. They will not stop the sending of data if it is sent as HTTP on port 80, because they can't separate it from normal web traffic. /Troberg