People were pirating movies and music long before iTunes or any other digital services offered digital versions for sale. They just ripped the cd's and cassettes and records they had to mp3 and shared them that way. Remember Napster?  In fact piracy is one of the main reasons services like itunes came about in the first place, to offer a legal alternative to downloading music. 

Adobe still offers hard copies of CS6 for sale to those who don't want to subscribe to CC, you just have to ask them, and hand them the $4K it will cost you for a hard copy license, that will never be updated and is already about 4 years out of date. 4 years is a huge amount of time in terms of software technology. Their subscription service has opened their software up to millions of people who could not afford it before, because $500 a year for their entire suite plus all updates is far more affordable to most people than a one-time fee of $4K for a bunch of software that most studios have moved away from by now. And it gives software companies more security against piracy. And the majority of the industry leaders are moving to subscription services, because statistics have proven over and over again, the majority of consumers actually prefer subscription based services due to their ease of use and always available anywhere you go platform, which is why netflix and amazon are killing premium cable channels and video rentals. The majority of people making the most stink about software subscriptions are those that want to pirate anyway and are upset because they know subscription services will eventually kill the majority of piracy.