E-books aren’t the only digital booty on pirates’ minds.
The explosive growth of the iPhone and Apple’s iPhone App store has sparked a free-for-all across the Internet for pirated Apps — and there is little Apple CEO Steve Jobs is doing about it.
“The pirated versions of the apps [usually] show up on a few sites within a day. [Our game] Tap-Fu was up in about 40 minutes,” said Tod Baudais, owner of the iPhone game developer Smells Like Donkey. “We are estimating that there are around 10,000 pirated copies of our app out there, but it could easily be more.”
Using pirated apps requires “jailbreaking,” or unlocking your iPhone — disabling Apple’s digital tether to the device. A jailbroken iPhone can use any app, including those not approved by Apple. According to Pinch Media, almost one out of every 10 iPhones is jailbroken.
Michael Schade, CEO of the game company Fishlabs, sees the piracy problem getting worse.
“Our first iPhone games had a piracy rate of 10 percent to 20 percent, which is similar to the PC industry and something we could deal with. About a year later . . . we had a piracy rate of 95 percent.”