GIMP is a great free program, although I use Photoshop.
As to the torrent discussion, there are many many many many simple ways of not getting caught, and in fact, I believe the hierarchy of who authorities target goes like this:
Webmaster
Torrent Uploader (guy who actually cracks and makes it available)
Seeders (People who leave uTorrent running to allow packets to be downloaded elsewhere)
Torrenters (People who download the torrents)
In the case of Seeders and Torrenters, there are so many people doing this (especially for bigger name products such as Adobe) that they will almost never actually go for individuals, as they would rather get the entire site or just the torrent itself off of the site. That being said, there are many ways just to hide yourself and become anonymous, and if I am correct, I do believe that piratebay has an anonymous download torrent link nowadays.