I got an email today basically asking permission to use my dictionary for an iPhone app, but the email also said they can get my whole site the same way google does but since I'm an ordinary person they are going to ask my permission. I said no - it has taken me over a year to build this site. The site has a copyright notice on it for attribution non-commercial, as it is a good resource for kids and I don't mind if people grab a single entry for a school project. I put that copyright notice there as a (possibly useless) attempt to discourage people from mirroring/scraping the entire website, which is what this guy wanted to do. And slightly off-topic, isn't it a bit stupid to want to use a 200+ meg website as a base for an iPhone app? I thought iPhone apps were supposed to be small ...
Why not give them a LICENSE to use the content and collect a "donation" to help you further progress the site and or your ad network?... As far as small.... 200+ megs isn't all that large...
Not sure I'd want to work with someone who sends me an email "i want kids contens on your web site" with veiled threats though. 200 meg isn't big for a website, no, but I was under the impression it was rather large for an iPhone app ... and there are only about 2200 published words to date so it isn't even a remotely complete dictionary to use just the text without the images. I don't have an iPhone so I don't know how big the apps usually are. On the upside, this is making me want to check if the matching .mobi is free and put up a mobile version of the site Edit: seeing issues with 10M apps I think converting a 200M (and rising!) site to an app is a particularly poor choice of subject matter ... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1556814/iphone-maximum-download-3g-size-mb ... they'd be better off writing a game, or a spelling app or something.