When I was just out of school, everyone used “stolen” versions of Adobe software before Creative Cloud existed. They had no DRM on any of it. You could just copy the application folder to a hard drive and go. This was because they charged hundreds of dollars per app, and you had to buy the new version when it was released. Students and struggling graduates were priced out, so we didn’t have any other choice but to run an old buggy version for as long as possible.

Now, everyone pays a monthly subscription fee and Adobe can just steal your work whenever they want to.