There's an interesting thread over at Neowin about WinCustomize's new bandwidth system.

Let me outline how it works:
After you've downloaded over 50 megabytes of content, you are asked to tie your WinCustomize account to your Stardock customer account. In effect, the site begins to check to see if you're a Stardock customer in some way. This only happens to those who are Citizen access, anyone else won't see it.

At 100 megabytes of downloaded content, the new system is activated. If you are a user with Citizen access and have downloaded >100 megabytes and have not registered any of your SD software nor have purchased an account you are required to do one of those things in order to continue downloading from the site.

So in effect, if you're using the shareware version of WindowBlinds and have been silently downloading skins for months, at some point you now actually have to register your software if you want to keep using the site's bandwidth.

One user in that discussion commented "You knew the risks of piracy when you guys opened the site..." to which the obvious response seems to be collectively: "Yes, we knew the risks and here is our solution which you apparently don't like."

I just can't seem to grasp how anyone can possibly argue that the people who register their software or purchase Object Desktop should somehow pay for those who are pirating the software to be able to download an unlimited number of skins.

As it is, 100 megs is a LOT of stuff.