I remember back in my Apple II days, when companies first experimented with copy protection, 2 things happened before most abandoned the idea: 1) users migrate to reduce hassels, intentionally or otherwise 2) the copy protection breakers ("crackers" today, except downsouth, of course) were always more technically advanced than the prtotection. There were special chips and boards for the Apple II that let you defeat copy protection. Often these items made a lot more money than the programs they were designed to liberate. You could even find them in the back of computer magazines.... The fact that there's now a mass of people on the Internet, which various companies are now using to again justify introducing locked software, will not in my not so humble opinion do anything but caause the past to repeat itself. Often, the more locks you put on a thing make it all that more tempting to steal. I don't buy the argument, might not buy the product, we'll see. I lived in a bad part of town for a while in college. I remember one proposal to deal with drug dealers/crack: for some reason that escapes me, "they" wanted was to eliminate pay phones. I think they actually did that in that part of town. This of course made the neighborhood worse in some ways. Lots of poor folks didn't have phones, and were therefore cut off; or, if something happened to yours, you couldn't call the phone co., and, worst, no longer could you run to a phone to call 911. The powers that be were blinded to all these legitimate needs, or their loss somehow seemed a fair price to pay--inconveniencing people widely. What was the impact on the bad guys? Zero, of course. Completely screwy and really the same thing here. You don't solve a problem by encroaching on legitimate users. Strikes me as shortsighted and bad business. I wish CL would get off this tangent and focus on some new gee-whiz features. That's how you defeat pirates, by making a large amount of people want to buy your software, respect your company, and reward your efforts. --Patrick Snazzy Graphics

I hope it isn't vbox they are planning on incorporating. I d/l'd a trial version of something from Symantec. I was worried about a virus, I think. They use vbox to somehow meter your trial. This program took over. Made my entire windows install unstable. Everytime I did a "file open" from any application, not just within the Symantec one, vbox would be called. Often it gave me the cryptic error "vbox injection error." No idea of when else this app was called or how this effected overall performance, but it must (I don't even run screensavers on my graphics machine). Took me months (finally with help on Experts Exchange--only question I ever needed to ask there) to trace this to the uninstalled Symantec app. Having gone through the registry and my hard disks for every ref to vbox, I finally stopped getting regular crashes. I still don't trust my windows install, and have been putting off the usual 2-3 days of reformat-reinstall on my work critical machine. I also no longer use the live update feature in Winfax, which I own, for fear that it reinstalls vbox. Never again will install something I suspect uses vbox. Never again will I buy Symantec, after buying their products for (10?) years for myself and corporations. I don't trust companies that treat the disease by killing the patient. I don't trust spyware. I don't trust people who don't trust me. CL will ensure my further graduation to Max/Character Studio, or a similar solution, if they are going to include something vbox like. Already they have ensured I will not be an early adopter. I'll be waiting to see what happens.