Taking out copy protection won't alter price one iota. That seems to be a much-vaunted myth floated around on the net. The big companies have found a price that customers will pay. The copy protection will cost them not much - it's only a licensing fee, and I can't imagine it's much. Look at the Korg stuff. You only pay $30 (I think that's right) for the dongle.Lots of guff about pricing...
Compare Waves stuff - uses PACE and costs an arm and a leg, whereas devs like Princeton can release high quality plugins using PACE at quite alot less. They charge what they think is OK and what they think their customers will pay. If Princeton weren't selling Eventide algorithms, they probably couldn't even get away with charging anything close to their current price - the name sells it. Same as Logic, Cubase sell because of reputation. And reputations are often earned through product quality over many years, like it or not that it affects price.
You look at the main hosts which go back to the origins of s/w sequencers and they were never cheap. Never will be. Their price hasn't gone up in relation to warez...it's simply gone up in relation to price indexes, inflation and what they can charge. When I bought my 1st version of Cubase in 1990, it seemed like alot of money. Indeed, for what it did compared to what Cubase does today, SX is probably nowadays cheaper comparatively. I could only run a midi CubaseVST with a shitload of h/w. Now CubaseSX can do the whole shebang on its own.
But I will agree that FL is possibly destined for losses if they try to charge the same as the big boys. I think that's a fight they can only lose. The fact it's cheaper is what attracts the custom it does, and that's its attraction.
Copy Protection can be a bummer though. I personally have never minded a dongle - it just works quietly in the background, never caused me one second of angst. C/R puts me off though - that can be inconvenient, although not destructive. PACE has been very dodgy over the years and consequently I won't go near it, which means I lose out on one or two very good plugins.
But if they got rid of PACE, Dongles, C/R and even a simple registration number...I doubt very much I'd pay a cent less for anything. There are very few things in life that actually drop in price. If there's an outcry from enough people that prices stayed the same if copy protection was dropped, all the devs would need to do would be to throw in the odd extra feature for extra value (probably which most of us wouldn't actually use anyway).
), I simply was saying maybe where you are, but not in my world. I'm not saying that I live in honest town usa, I'm saying that I filter out the untrustworthy from my life. I do hold myself to a high standard, but it's not because I've got something to hide....because I don't, I do so out of pride. Obviously you hold yourself to the same standard so you too should take pride. 
