The pirate isn't stealing the apple when the salesman isn't looking. He's given the stolen apple from the thief knowing that it's stolen.
Although companies could just protect their software against piracy better? Look how many illegal Photoshop users there are. Surely Adobe has looked into making activating Photoshop more secure?
Adobe is almost certainly not interested in putting more piracy protection on PhotoShop. The software it does want to lock down is stuff like Elements.
Basically, your typical PS pirates are one of two types: the first is students (either "officially" enrolled students or people who are trying to teach themselves the software) and the second is hobbyists who aren't going to shell out $500+ for the software no matter what.
If the first case, Adobe actually makes money on those pirates. They're not loosing much/anything because only a small number of the students would have actually paid had they had to, and they would have bought much cheaper student copies. After they graduate, though, they will either get a job with a company who buy them a license, or they will go "pro" and buy a copy after a couple of paying jobs.
If these students had not had relatively easy access to a pirated copy there's a good chance they would turn to another product - some competitor that is easy to pirate or worse (for Adobe) an open source product like GIMP. If that happens they've now lost out on future sales to that person
forever. You get to your new office and they have a CS2 seat for you. You know GIMP though, so you just download a copy and get on with your work. The office updates to CS3 and you mention you don't need it, so your boss can save $1000. This is what Adobe is afraid of. This holds true if you become a freelancer - you use GIMP in school so you don't ever have the need to buy a legal, or updated, copy of PhotoShop... ever.
In the latter case (the hobbyist who will never buy the product because the don't NEED it) there's no lost sale, hence no lost revenue, meaning every dime spent on copy protection is a loss. But, as I mentioned, packages like Elements ($50-100, targeted at a large user base of non-pro users) do benefit from copy protection, so I can see where they'd want to lock that down as much as reasonable. In fact, making PhotoShop easy to pirate and locking Elements down would probably be a good thing for sales. You get all the above benefits of piracy, and when a user who pirates PhotoShop, decides he likes it, but it does more than he needs could be pushed towards Elements.
This is pretty common with software used in business, but iLife and iWork don't fit these models, so there's other factors to consider there. I think the Box Set concept is the way to go, but the pricing is a little high (because of the unnecessary inclusion of OS X, which is updated only half as often as the other two packages). They should start including iWork with new Mac purchases like they do iLife (and OS X, obviously) and then give you free updates licensed to that machine for as long as it is covered by AppleCare (so free updates for a year free, and an added incentive to buy the extended AppleCare package).
