Copy-protection schemes do not prevent piracy or (I STRONGLY suspect) improve sales, any more than anti-virus products have put virus-writing to death. People with coding (and de-coding) ability will produce a crack for almost anything, and people who won't pay for the products WILL either do without them or get cracked versions. Copy-protection schemes (and I've seen a few come and go over the years) almost invariably infuriate a significant proportion of the users, and make vendors who haven't thought through the consequences feel smugly safer in thehopes that they won't lose sales. You don't lose real sales through piracy - thos eof us who are going to pay for a product will do so or have done so. So restrict the usage of a program to a single computer containing the hard drive at time of original installation negates many upgrades and indeed hardware failures, even if the copy protection scheme has no other ill-effect. From the documentation I've just been reading it looks like the entire program MAY be being slowed down by having copy-protection checking for legitimacy at uknown intervals (continuously?). As for the hardware accelleration that I think many of us were hopin g(or even, in this day and age, expecting) that wouldn't help render speeds - but it'd sure help the actual preview/working speed tons. If you want to maximise sales, there's a far better way of doing it. Produce a well-written (rare now but still possible, I think) comparatively reliable and fast product, and release it (when finished) at a reasonable cost. Reasonable people are willing to pay a reasonable cost for a good product.