Today, Google announced an initiative to combat this, simply called the “Licensing Service for Android Applications” which is free for Android Developers to use. The platform supports anywhere from Android 1.5 up, and “provides a secure mechanism to manage access to all Android Market paid applications.”

he system works by allowing the application to query the Android market’s licensing server, and return information based on whether or not the application is licensed for use for the current user based on sales records. According to the blog post, the service operates in real time over the network — Wifi, EDGE, 3G or GPRS and “provides more flexibility in choosing license-enforcement strategies, and a more secure approach in protecting your applications from unauthorized use, than copy protection.”