Adobe, Jet Brains, etc, download the actual binaries, and just call home. Piracy would involve disabling/bypassing those checks, which I assume exists. (Been out of that world for a while, but I remember the good ol' days of warez via IRC and FTP)
I still use CS2 which was made "free" by Adobe for a time (they shutdown the servers) but fortunately got archived and mirrored by a lot of sites.
There are activation cracks for the creative cloud suite.