https://itts.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Piano.woa has worked even while iTunes Connect has been down

If the app contacts their web servers after it gets installed or in the course of use.

We do this with our iPhone games, like Raptor Copter (hunt velicoraptors in your Chinook helicopter!). It's part of our achievements/leaderboards framework, so we kept it in, but it also lets us compare the total number of sales to total iPhone device ids in our database. Piracy isn't a big problem, and we generally don't care anyway, but the data is available.

We had the scrolling LED sign in our office rattle off sales in real-time, which was fun for awhile.

As a quick piracy note, you can also detect pirated iPhone apps this way: http://thwart-ipa-cracks.blogspot.com/2008/11/detection.html

Back to iFart--I can't imagine many people would pirate a farting $0.99 app, versus a more expensive, more popular game. Maybe 1% or less?

That's quite useful, thanks!