Adobe has decided to change its approach to the war on piracy by making all future versions of Photoshop available for free. New figures presented to Adobe showed that there are more than ten times the number of pirated versions of the software being used than the legal versions.

“We realize that it is futile to try and stop certain people from downloading illegal copies of our software when the alternative is to pay hundreds of dollars for it,” a spokesman for Adobe said yesterday. “This is why we have decided to offer all future versions of Photoshop for free. The free software will be feature complete, with no restrictions on use.”

The spokesman went on detailling how Adobe plans on adding ads to the software, ads that will supposedly bring in more money since the free software should grab all the users of the pirated versions. The ads will use Google Adsense technology to determine the type of ads to serve, which will predominately be Photoshop Tutorial ads. The Adsense technology will take keywords from the text, layer names, and file names to determine what ads to serve. Adobe will then either get paid per click or per view, depending on the type of ad.

Certain menus and dropdowns will have ads included as well. For example, the bottom of the fonts drop down will have a link to a Google Ad for font downloads and the filter tab will have filter download and tutorial ads. There will also be a search feature included in new versions of Photoshop that will pull up results in a similar fashion as Google’s search results, with normal results being next to paid ads.

A complete list of ads, ad positions, and ad pricing has not be released.

Tags: Adobe Photoshop, Google Adsense, Google Adwords