I think they changed that recently due to a lot of pirated copies of photopost going around. There were even people publically advertising they had it, and also had other illegal users trying to get support from the forums. Which is why they changed the system altogether to make you enter a license number to access some of the support areas of the site.
I don't see it as a big problem, it may be a bit harsh but they had various illegal activities going on. Such as even people pretending to send emails as the photopost admin asking for license numbers, etc etc. So it is probably more or less a temporary solution to help curb the illegal copying of the software for a while.
Also, being a fairly new piece of software, they want to ensure they get every penny they earned, because it doesn't take too many illegal copies to completely shut them down due to lack of funds
