PJF, I was just thinking the same thing. I'm not a thief and I'm offended by the suggestion that I am. Sure my point of view is different to fox's but it doesn't mean that I would like to see the same result in the end. Thank you for your post, which was very well written. cya Derik.

Wow, sorry I touched a nerve there :) Does anyone else think that was a bit over the top ? I'm a Nazi.. LOL This is a interesting topic, but I don't think that was called for. What I was saying (which obviously didn't come across), is that if Curious labs via Anthony are trying to stop piracy to increase their sales, then I don't see how it will work. At the end of the day Curious's owners look at the bottom line, they are not going to be on a "holy search" to purge the world of pirates. They are trying to produce a good product and sell it. Hunting down pirates who are going to get their copy of poser and stick it on a cd on the shelf isn't going to make any difference to the bottom line, neither is removing the copy from the "graphics guru" who has every bit of software he can find loaded. There is no chance that they will buy the software. Sure we should do everything that can be done to stop Warez trading, but at the moment how is that possible ? For every new bit of copy protection the pirates seem to find a way around it and so it goes on. I'd love to see the day when pirate software was not available, software would be much cheaper for everyone. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe Curious should be the first to make a real stand. How about everyone spend half a hour looking for a pirate copy of poser/pro pack ? I'm sure the sales will sky rocket. cya Derik

Anthony, Do you truly believe that removing warez copies will increase sales ? The average warez junkie is just interested in expanding his collection and as such increase his standing with his peers. Maybe one or two percent of the pirate copies of poser might end up being used and of those maybe 99.9% would not buy the product if they had to, so what are you losing, a few sales, a very few sales ? On the other side there is the cost of your time to curious labs. I just don't see how the justification is there. Before anyone jumps at me I'm totally against piracy and believe that everyone should be rewarded for there efforts, however I think that the losses that we see in the media are somewhat exaggerated. All in all I think Anthony is doing a great job, I've seen the reaction on some of the boards to his letters, some of the responses are classics, however is it MAKING Curious Labs money ? I don't think so. cya Derik

Sorry, RIB -- RenderMan Interface Bytestream Protocol. Poser can export in this format which was created (I think ?) by pixar, and is a method of specifying a scene which can then be rendered by an number of different programs. BRMT -- A shareware RIB rendered PRman -- Pixar's PhotoRealistic RenderMan renderer (not so affordable!!). I'm mostly looking at BRMT myself. The problem is that I seem to remember reading that the exports that poser produce don't fully match the specifications and therefore are not really of much use. I just want to confirm this if anyone knows. thanks again.