But while millions of people use Adobe’s premium products, not everyone pays for that privilege. Unauthorized Photoshop releases have been appearing on computers worldwide for 25 years and other Adobe products are regularly pirated close to their launch. Over time this has led Adobe to invest substantial sums of money on anti-piracy measures including DRM and even legal action. But there are other ways to deal with the problem.

In May last year and much to the disappoint of Adobe’s millions of pirate ‘customers’, the company announcemend that it would be changing the way it does business. Boxed products, a hangover from the last decade and earlier, would be phased out and replaced with a cloud-based subscription model.

On the one hand, many pirates heard the word “cloud” and associated that with a lack of local machine control, something that can cause issues when trying to run unlicensed software. Adobe, on the other hand, appeared to be looking at product development and the piracy problem from a different angle.

While attempts at hacking its cloud service would present another technical barrier to piracy, with its new offering the tech giant also looked towards making its product more affordable. A few dollars a month rather than $700 in one go was aimed at providing an economic reason for even the most budget-restricted not to pirate. But has the strategy worked?

According to new comments from Fabio Sambugaro, VP of Enterprise Latin America at Adobe, unauthorized use of the company’s products is definitely down since the cloud switch.

“Piracy has fallen,” Sambugaro says. “It’s hard to measure, but we’ve seen many companies seeking partnerships that in the past wouldn’t have done so.”

According to information released to investors last month, Adobe exited quarter two this year with 2,308,000 subscribers of its Creative Cloud service, an increase of 464,000 over the first quarter of 2014. The company attributed 53% of the company’s quarter two revenue to “recurring sources” such as its Creative and Marketing Cloud services.

So have the pirates given up on Adobe? In a word, no.

One only has to scour the indexes of the world’s most popular torrent sites to see that Photoshop, Photoshop Lightroom, Illustrator, Premiere, Indesign, After Effects and Acrobat Pro all take prominent places in the charts of most-popular torrents. No surprise then that on The Pirate Bay, Photoshop CS6 – the last version of Photoshop before the cloud switch – is king of the software downloads by a long way.

Also, and contrary to fears aired by pirates alongside Adobe’s original strategy change announcement, the cloud has not made it impossible to run unauthorized versions of Photoshop CC 2014, for example. Expected functional restrictions aside, torrent sites have plenty of working copies of Creative Cloud releases, but is this necessarily a bad thing?

There are those who believe that some level of piracy is useful as a try-before-you-buy option on a traditionally expensive product such as Photoshop. But what makes this notion even more interesting today is that Adobe’s switch to the cloud – and its much lower price point for entry – may see people investing a few dollars a month for increased functionality and a simple life, instead of one spent jumping through hoops with an inferior and oftentimes awkward product.

And Adobe knows it.

“I do not think people who pirate our software do it because they are bad people, or because they like to steal things. I just think that they decided that they can not afford it,” said Adobe’s David Wadhwani previously.

“And now, with the switch to subscriptions and with the ability to offer software at a cheaper price, we see that the situation is beginning to change and we’re excited.”

Richard Atkinson, Corporate Director of Worldwide Anti-Piracy, admitted last year that the company would move away from “enforcement-led anti piracy” to a “business-focused pirate-to-pay conversion program.”

If the company is to be believed, that is now paying off.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Yesterday we covered comments from Warner Bros’ Chief of Anti-Piracy Operations David Kaplan, who said that the movie studio is now viewing piracy as a proxy for consumer demand. Based on this belief, the company is adjusting its legal offerings to better compete with unauthorized consumption.

Warner’s comments imply that copyright holders themselves can take significant steps to decrease online piracy by looking at what consumers really want. This position is also being embraced by Adobe, which has resulted in major changes to the computer software company’s anti-piracy policies.

In a teaser for the summit, Richard Atkinson, Adobe’s Corporate Director of Worldwide Anti-Piracy, says the company now takes a more positive approach to solving piracy. Instead of hammering on enforcement, Adobe is now focusing on converting pirates into paying customers.

“The strategy and concept of moving from traditional ‘enforcement-led anti piracy’ to a ‘business-focused pirate-to-pay conversion program’ is a BIG change, needing changes to operational elements as well as cultural elements,” Atkinson explains.

According to Atkinson the public has grown weary of the age-old war on piracy and awareness campaigns telling them not to steal.

“Everyone is tired of the entire concept and term ‘Anti-Piracy’, even the term ‘Content Protection’ too. It feels like an ongoing war that has been going on for 20+ years… with the same old good-guy vs bad-guy battles,” Atkinson notes.

Adobe’s Anti-Piracy Chief stresses that piracy is a problem that’s in part created by businesses, and that these same businesses hold the keys to solving it.

There are no breakthrough technologies that can help to reduce piracy according to Atkinson. Similar to Warner Bros., the company believes that they can make most progress by trying to understand why people pirate, and come then up with competing products.

“The core fundamental aspect is not necessarily technology… it is UNDERSTANDING what is really going on. In my years working in this space, I have consistently found that very few people actually have FACTS about what is going on.”

“Once you have the facts, then it will change your beliefs and your actions,” he adds.

One of the results of Adobe’s new strategy is the shift away from boxed products and towards a cloud-based subscription model. The company recently launched their Creative Cloud, which aims to make Photoshop and other products more affordable to the public.

The company believes that by spreading out the costs their products will become accessible to a larger group of consumers, hopefully converting some pirates into paying customers along the way.

“I do not think people who pirate our software do it because they are bad people, or because they like to steal things. I just think that they decided that they can not afford it,” Adobe’s David Wadhwani said earlier this month when the Creative Cloud launched.

It’s refreshing to see how Adobe, Warner Bros. and other companies are changing their attitudes towards piracy. While there’s no doubt that enforcement against commercial infringers will remain high on the agenda, the realization that waging war with potential consumers is not the way to go is a healthy one.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The name Sifonr originates from the word ‘siphon’ which is a U-shaped tube – a YouTube. The service uses the latest P2P capabilities of Adobe’s Flash and is the first site to really show off what it can do for real-time communication and file-sharing. It is not going to be any competition for torrent sites, but the innovative use of P2P technology makes it definitely worth a mention on TorrentFreak.

Aside from video and text chatting, Sifonr allows users to share files in real-time. To top it off the Flash-based Sifons can be embedded just as easily as a YouTube video, so people can post them to Facebook or their blogs (styleable widgets are available) to provide a direct communication channel or discussion platform.

TorrentFreak spoke to Floze, the founder of the site, who sees Sifonr as a potential next generation communication tool.

“Sifonr is about sharing your thoughts and ideas, kinda like on YouTube, only in a more direct and more involved way. It’s not supposed to be another spin-off of some video or live-chat portal, I rather see it as a new way of communication.”

“For me it means the simple and logical ‘next step’ of today’s web-interaction, even if it turns out to be ‘only’ an interesting social experiment in the end,” Floze says. “The borders between author and reader, artist and beholder, broadcaster and consumer have diminished ever since I can remember. Now with Sifonr you are always both at the same time. Just passively enjoy it, or be an active part of it.”

In theory, thousands of people can join and share files in a single Sifon, but this of course will make the video streaming part pretty much unusable. Since the service has no real competitors it will be interesting to see how the public decides to use it. One feature that works well with multiple people is the file-sharing part. Floze told TorrentFreak that adding file-sharing support seemed only logical since the video and audio streaming is P2P based as well.

“File-sharing in a Sifon works pretty much like in any file sharing software – you load (seed) the file, it gets chopped into chunks of data, others get notified of its presence, and the downloaded pieces are immediately shared between peers and put back together when completed. Once a file is loaded into a Sifon, it is available as long as one healthy seeder.”

“The major limitation Adobe put on sharing is that, for security reasons, all shared data needs to be loaded into the system memory instead of being read and written from disc. The ‘official’ limit is supposed to be at 100MB per shared file, but I see no reason why more shouldn’t work if the RAM is sufficient. There shouldn’t be anything keeping you from sharing larger files, at least for stuff up to around 1GB,” Floze explained.

Any type of file can be shared in a Sifon, but FLV (flash video) files that are encoded with the latest magic h.264 and AC3 get a special treatment. These files are played directly and instantly in the Sifon as soon as sufficient data is buffered. Instant MP3 playing is another feature that is currently on the roadmap and will be implemented in the near future.

“I only created a piece of software that I thought was kind of missing, and that I’d use myself because I think it is fun. I hope that people use it to do something productive and enjoyable, though unfortunately I have seen many wanking dicks too [which receive an instant ban from sifonr.com] from people who think it’s all another Chatroulette clone. I hope it’s more than that,” Floze told TorrentFreak.

People who’re interested in trying Sifonr can start their own Sifon in just a few clicks (language can be set to English). The service works as advertised but people should keep in mind that it’s still in startup mode, and caution is advised while browsing Sifons as there’s no 24/7 flesh patrol yet. Adobe Flash Player 10.1 is a requirement as the P2P technology wasn’t implemented in earlier versions.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Kevin Towes, Product Manager of Adobe Flash Media Server told Beet.TV that the upcoming release of the Flash player will include new P2P technology that will “significantly change the way we think of media delivery.” According to Towes, this technology could in some cases completely eliminate bandwidth costs.

The system Adobe is offering to support P2P Flash is called Stratus. It is offered to developers free of charge and can support both live and on-demand video streaming. Besides video, Stratus can also be used for Flash based multi-player games and other forms of real time communication.

For broadcasters and video services, Stratus has the capacity to eliminate a significant amount of bandwidth costs. Instead of serving the media from a central server, users will provide the necessary bandwidth. Adobe’s Stratus system serves as an intermediary in this process, managing the communications between Flash players much like a BitTorrent tracker does for BitTorrent transfers.

Towes explained that Stratus users will first have to agree to participate in a P2P-enabled Flash swarm, similar to how they are now asked to indicate whether Flash can use their webcam. If users do not want to share bandwidth, the broadcaster has the option to offer a regular stream, a degraded stream or no stream at all.

Adobe’s Stratus project is not the first to combine P2P technology with Flash. Last year, during the inauguration of President Obama, CNN used P2P-assisted technology to send out the live stream to a million viewers worldwide. This required users to install a browser plugin called Octoshape, which then made the Flash video P2P compliant.

Other initiatives to serve on-demand and live streaming have been showcased by the Triber research team, who use a BitTorrent-based solution that does not require any central servers. Tribler is currently working with several European TV-broadcasters to test this technology in the real world.

The impact of Adobe getting seriously involved in P2P streaming could be a real game changer though. One of the main advantages Adobe’s Flash has is that nearly every computer has it installed, which should facilitate the adoption rate among content providers. One less hurdle to take, and a significant one.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

As usual, the Adobe products will only be filtered out if the user has chosen to block copyrighted material during installation by checking the ‘Enable Content Filtering’ option.

According to the company, such deals are being signed in hope that fewer consumers will be sued for using the program. They say this is “a significant step toward a positive relationship with software producers and means a safer peer-to-peer process for LimeWire users.”

The company has clearly been trying to go legit, but at the same time not charge users for anything but the Pro version. This became apparent when they added a pop-up message that notified users that a license for the song/file they were downloading could not be found and asked them if they were sure they wanted to download it anyway.

LimeWire was sued by the RIAA earlier this year after the company announced that it was planning to integrate BitTorrent support in the program. The RIAA demanded $150,000 per song “wilfully uploaded.” This did not stop them from going ahead and implementing it anyway.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.