I've pirated Reason on occasion. Not lately, though.

Yes, but not after they've added the dongle protection (and new (driver based?) check system).

Other software with dongle-based protection has been pirated in the past. There will almost certainly be ways of circumventing this protection if software crackers want to do it.

I can't fathom a reason why "software crackers" don't want to do Cubase and/or Reason though.

The thing is, those "dongle-based protection" have been pirated in the past only in the rare cases where an issue was found in the dongle scheme or keys where leaked, etc. And those don't happen frequently -- whereas any old school copy protection method was broken a few days/weeks at most post release (sometimes even before release, from the demo/alpha versions).

Hasn't happened in 5-10 years for lots of physical key based products, so even if possible again, it's of theoritical and not practical value (we ain't seeing them anytime soon).

Fravia said, very roughly, that some of the dongle systems were secure, but the implementation by software vendors was often lousy.

I guess they've stopped being lousy at the implementation.

Had to look who Fravia is (or was) -- interesting stuff.