Although Adobe has never explicitly stated that one of the motivating factors behind its decision to transform its Creative Cloud into a subscription-only cloud service was to curb software piracy, doing so was surely one of its intentions.

Unfortunately it hasn’t worked.

Fstoppers is reporting this morning that a hacked version of Photoshop CC is already available to download via a number of BitTorrent sites, though obviously downloading such a file would be illegal. It’s probably inappropriate for me to post a link to the torrent here, but if you want to search for “Adobe Photoshop CC 14.0 Final Multilanguage” you’ll likely stumble across it. The file was uploaded by a user called Ching Liu, and according to comments left by users it appears to be the real deal.

What’s interesting is how quickly the hacker/s have gotten around Adobe’s piracy protection. If you buy the legitimate software, Adobe requires that you connect to the web and verify your Creative Cloud subscription before using the software. Presumably, Mr. Ching has managed to bypass this authorization feature.

Once activated, the software then needs to be re-validated every 30 days (this process is done automatically), so we can’t be sure if the hackers have bypassed this procedure as well. What we do know is that the software definitely works – the genuine Photoshop CC has an offline status, and the copy appears to do so as well.

Adobe will no doubt be disappointed that someone’s managed to pirate its software so soon, but in all likelihood it must have known that someone would find a way, even if it hoped that doing so might have taken them a little longer.

To be fair to Adobe, it probably never really intended to stop the pirates completely – doing so is nigh-on impossible – but its cloud model may still help it to cut down on the number of people using fake copies. We must remember that Photoshop used to cost in the region of $700 under the old system, a huge expense for someone who’s only a photo-hobbyist. Now, with its subscription model, that’s been cut to just $240 a year – still not cheap, but with the option to pay $20 a month, the model might just convince a few more users to pay up. At least, those who have a conscience anyhow.

Of course, we should point out that its not just anti-piracy that’s motivating Adobe’s subscription model – there are other factors involved. Creative Cloud now comes with features like backups, tutorials, social integration and lots more.