BeeJiveIM, one of the most popular and feature rich applications in the App Store released a new update which included an interesting security measure.  The update was put forth to reduce pirated version of the application, similar to many other developers in the support for anti-piracy.

When the user attempts a login from any of the various services (aim, msn, icq, etc) a black screen comes up reading ‘PC LOAD LETTER’.  It then quits the application and promptly opens an Office Space clip  [Video here] through the youtube application. Curious users began asking questions; Was it a glitch? A hidden easter egg? Nope! The BeeJiveIM developers purposely implemented the anti-piracy feature into the application to ward away those hacked versions.  Below is a statement directly issues from the developers.

We have recently implemented new anti-piracy measures in BeejiveIM for iPhone. We have tried to keep our approach fun with an error message and a video. But we hope our message is clear: please respect the work of developers.

While this does shoo away many iPhone culprits, you can always copy the ‘iTunesMetadata.plist’ file from another application and throw it in the BeeJiveIM folder for a fix. However this does require a jailbroken iPhone and we are not condoning any piracy.  You should always support the developers, especially if they’ve created a great application like BeejiveIM.

BeeJiveIM is currently available in the iTunes App Store for $9.99 [LINK]