Virtual (or hardware) dongles are no protection, unfortunately. Hackers will make cracks for either one if they can, although I don't know why they want to do it. Honest people will buy Poser 5, but the ratio of wares copies to legal copies will always be huge for any popular software, so I think Curious has to accept that. One way to avoid illegal distribution is the "dumb terminal" idea like Larry Ellison wants to do: have all the software on servers and then control access to it on an IP-by-IP basis. But that's not realistic economics right now. The only estimate I have ever seen of the wares/legal ratio was from a developer named Simon Fraser (sp?), who said the registration rate for his downloaded shareware was only 0.5%. This means about 200 illegal copies for every paid copy. So I can see why Curious wants to control it, but virtual (or hardware) dongles are not going to succeed. They may cut the wares ratio down, but wares dudes will still steal it every chance they get. The only bright spot is that dudes who download it are usually too stupid to use it, so they only download it to add to their collection.