Copy protection and Customer assistance...
Copy Protection is an old story, at least for someone like me, who has been working in the software market for 30 years. I've seen software which required to plug a hardware device on the parallel port (and created a lot of problems with printers), CDs with special formatting which in many cases didn't stop the distribution of pirated copies, but stopped legal buyers from using them...
The technical solution adopted in Hal 6 is not perfect, but it's much less intrusive than many others.
I agree that the licencing mechanism is, quite honestly, the only aspect where Hal 6 is worse than Hal 5, and I agree that it should work as smoothly as the other components of the product. It also slows down some operations. Developing Hal's plugins, I have sometimes generated some abnormal situations in my Hal Development Environment (but I think most users shouldn't do such strange "brain surgery" to Hal, as I do) and I got some error message about the licence. However, just clicking on the "Input activation code" button, I got automatically the activation in a few seconds.
As for Customer Assistance, I usually work with big companies which spend millions of dollars to buy customizations of their ERP installations, just to find out that the programmer who wrote a certain piece of software has resigned and nobody is able to fix it, even if the company which sold it has hundreds of employees. Usually they say: "it's a bug of the old version, if you buy the new version you will solve it".
So I would not complain too much for a complete AI system, which is sold for only a few dollars.
Behind Hal there is a huge work, and we buy it for about the same price we pay for a dinner in a cheap restaurant: the real problem, in my opinion, is that AI might one day get in the mainstream and some software like Hal might be owned by someone who has a copyright on it, so you will need to pay royalties to get your personal robot working. Or maybe it will be some Robot Tax, to be paid to the State.