WW, the major difference is that you can't make reproductions of a book as easily as you can burn a CD. I believe they discussed a while back either adding a dongle key to the product, which would have increased the price, or this method, which was cheaper. Either way would have been fine with me. I've got Lightwave on my desktop at work, and on my laptop, and I have to move the little USB key to whichever one I want to use. Yes, a lot of people were happy with the P4 method, but too many of them had a pirated version. If they go with no protection, and accept the losses from piracy, the price of the package would likely have a huge increase, which would cause even more unhappiness. And as far as I know, there are no other products that do what Poser does, so there's no competition to support (unless you count Character Studio in 3DS Max, and if you don't like CL's protection, you'd better count them out as well.) Aside from no protection at all, what would you be happy with?