I don't know if this is related or not but back when Flickr was popular in like 2005 or 2006 my friends and I were uploading pictures of our events there (they're all still there AFAIK. We'd upload them to either our own accounts or for certain events to a shared account. One shared account is here: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/sourpower/albums" rel="nofollow">https://www.flickr.com/photos/sourpower/albums</a><p>I wanted copies of those pictures and the easiest way to get them was the write a tool to download them rather than have to coordinate with 3 to 15 friends and ask them to copy the images to a CD or USB stick or some other nonsense. Dropbox wasn't a thing and not all my friends were tech heads that would want to setup FTP servers.<p>Flickr had also come out with an API. APIs for online services seemed kind of new at that point and Flickr was one of the first AFAIK.<p>So I wrote the app <a href="https://blog.greggman.com/blog/flickrdown/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.greggman.com/blog/flickrdown/</a>
and a few months later it was accused by other users of flickr of being solely for the purpose of downloading copywritten images. Not once did I ever use it for such a purpose nor, AFAIK did any of my friends. None of us had any interest in other people's images on flickr, only shared images of mutually attended parties, bbq, picnics, events.<p>Those users reported the app to Flickr and the app was banned.<p>It was banned by the app's id. That meant you could register your own app and then hack in your app's id and still use it. IIRC I continued to use it to download pictures from our events but it always pissed me off they banned it. It also pissed me off because it wasn't accessing anything you couldn't just scrape for. The API made it easy to get a list of URLs, search for albums or people etc but you could easily write a script that just scraped the HTML to find all the same data. Didn't matter, flickr didn't budge.<p>It further pissed me off that over zealous flickr members accused me of lying about its purpose. Like many topics today, there is often absolutely nothing you can say that will convince someone else your intensions are not bad.