OK, with all this talk about Poser and copy protection, let's turn the tables a little bit ... Lets say you have an idea for a software program that is totally unique and unlike anything else on the market. So you pull a team of, say, 20-25 people together to develop it. You figure it will take two years to put it together, so you get some funding to pay your employees, buy their hardware and software, rent an office and office furniture, pay the utilities, and all that stuff. Two years go by, and the product is beta tested with rave reviews. Youre ready for release. Time to pay printers to print up the manuals, and pay to produce CDs for mass distribution. Now, youll have to hire more people to provide tech support and customer service while the developers start working on the next release or updates. After all, you want to stay in business so you can support the customers you hope youll get by selling your nifty software product. So you set your price. You figure in order to break even with the costs youve already mounted, and projecting that you want to stay in business for at least a couple of years (with some additional growth for support, marketing, and additional developers), you have to sell, say, 50,000 copies of the software. In order to sell that many, you have to get distributors (who mark it up) to push it out to retail stores (who also mark it up). Now your product is on the market. During the first couple of weeks, 10,000 people buy the software. Not bad!! 20% of the sales you hoped to make in the first couple of weeks! But then BOOOMMMM!!!!! Sales drop suddenly you find out that the product you worked so hard on has been posted on warez boards, and people are getting it for free. You still have 40,000 copies to sell to break even, support your growing customer base, and develop the next release. What would YOU do? Denise