I find this amusing. Adobe's piracy problem is of it's own making. They've cultivated these pirates for years by keeping their products priced so high, and by ignoring widespread piracy from students and amateurs. They've got their work cut out for them if they want to solve this problem.
An uncrackable adobe copy protection is what the Gimp (d*mn that name) really needs to finally get usable.
Legions of creative students will improve upon Gimp as soon as they can no longer use Adobe for free.
Professionals already pay for Adobe.
I'll echo radicalbyte's comment (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5911792" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5911792</a>) which is that Adobe doesn't care about the casual user who pirates their software. It's extremely expensive software that they would only expect professionals to pay for, and typically those designers, graphic artists, etc. at companies are not going to be pirating anything. Their companies will pay for the software, and given the choice, those professionals will pick the software they're most comfortable with. By making it pretty darn easy to get your hands on a pirated copy, Adobe is playing the long game but winning in the end as the steep learning curve keeps their users from switching.
The prospective of crackers is that all commercial software should be cracked & distributed amongst the community. It doesn't matter if it's a $20 chat client, or a $10K industrial CAD platform. Reverse engineering is a sport to them.
I found myself buying for the first time ps and illustrator. the edu subscription is 20$ month, which is finally, reasonable. I'm very happy to pay for what I'd been using for years but had previously been impossible to afford.
I love how the media keeps portraying CC as an anti-piracy measure. It may be a segue to it, but unless software truly lives in the cloud this would never be the case.<p>It's changing the revenue stream and in a lot of cases, it's more compelling for users to switch over.
And people can download music for free yet Apple sells billions of songs on iTunes.<p>People are more than happy to pay if the price/convenience is right.
If the CC's brought in one good thing, it's motivation to finally surgically remove Bridge from PS - I eyed it with suspicion when it came and tried to make itself at home; and I'm not terribly mourning the unceremonious slitting of the umbilical cord. (I am - in short - a miserable, tribal consumer.)