iPhone developers are looking at sticking advertising in their games because they are are finding them nicked by pirates.

James Bossert was happy when he noticed that his Whack 'em All iPhone game had 400 new users in one day last week. However he was shocked to discover that only 12 of them had paid 99 cents for the game on Apple's iPhone App Store.

He tracked down the the person who claimed to have cracked and distributed illegally. Bossert said that the iTunes App Store has many flaws which render it useless to the common user. Acting on the advice of the pirate, Bossert is planning to offer an advertising supported version of the game.

Pirated apps run only on iPhones that have been jailbroken, or opened up to third-party applications without Apple's authorisation, but Bossert claims that Apple's digital rights management is broken.

When developers try to talk to Apple about the problem they are ignored, which is the outfit's traditional method of dealing with bad news.

More here.