> Great, but why should the British Library, a non-profit charity and UK taxpayer assisted institution put these images on the servers of a US based for-profit company?
Why shouldn't they? It's to everyone's benefit for these to be as widely distributed as reasonably possible.
> There are a lot of talented Brits in the Bay Area, but there are also many great UK based programmers and companies in the UK who could have developed a home-grown solution.
These folks can now use the Flickr API to download each and every one of the photos and code to their hearts' content.
> Why shouldn't they? It's to everyone's benefit for these to be as widely distributed as reasonably possible
Because Flickr could one day be shut down, and eventually will be, however far on the future that may be. For resources like this such a disruption will be painful.
I'm not saying it is a bad idea, only that I understand the long-term hesitation in this.
We don't know what the future of Yahoo and Flickr will be. The terms of the deal could change drastically down the road, especially if Yahoo/Flickr get new owners.
There are also legal issues. Visitors from around the world will be accessing data from a US company as opposed to a UK organization bounded by UK and EU data protection laws (for what that's worth!).
These are images from dating up to the 19th century - there's nothing there affected by data protection laws.
As for the "terms of the deal" - that is only relevant if nobody bothers to download these images now. The images are all so old that the originals are out of copyright, and as far as I can see, the British Library have tagged them all "no known copyright restrictions", as Microsoft, who did the scanning, donated them to the public domain.
So these complaints are meaningless: Have a concern about the hosting? Mirror the images. As I'm sure various people will.
Even if Flickr were to shut down tomorrow, British Library still have them, and likely Microsoft too. And the books they are from still exists. It is the British Librarys job to ensure the preservation of the source material -, and they can provide them to other parties.
I think that yapcguy's concern around the data protection laws is not in relation to the contents of the picture collection, but rather the personal data, access logs, etc of the people using Flickr to search and view the collection.
It is a concern either way. His point seemed to be that if it were hosted by an EU entity, then at least it would be bound by EU data privacy laws. I'm not super familiar, but I think those are more strict than US privacy laws, for whatever that's worth.
The governments will be spying either way though, so I personally don't think it's much of a difference.
If the images were hosted in the EU, then there's limitations on what the hosting company can store and process about to visitors. For the USA, there is less protection.
How would a nonprofit service be any more insulted from shutting down some day? They made the data available. You could personally choose to re-host it using an endowment to fund it for a century. They're happy seeing it immediately and reliably accessible.
I generally trust the long-term stability/accessibility of libraries and archives more than I do something like Flickr. Even if it's not shut down, Flickr could well limit API access or do any number of other things.
> Because Flickr could one day be shut down, and eventually will be, however far on the future that may be. For resources like this such a disruption will be painful.
Which is precisely why it's good services like Flickr host stuff like this. The more services - private and public - that do, the less likely a shutdown will shut off access.
Why shouldn't they? It's to everyone's benefit for these to be as widely distributed as reasonably possible.
> There are a lot of talented Brits in the Bay Area, but there are also many great UK based programmers and companies in the UK who could have developed a home-grown solution.
These folks can now use the Flickr API to download each and every one of the photos and code to their hearts' content.