Because that's not their job? From their perspective it's quite literally spamming up their index and impeding the intended use of the commons. Those images and

Because that's not their job? From their perspective it's quite literally spamming up their index and impeding the intended use of the commons. Those images and all associated metadata should have been relocated to archive.org years ago. Instead it appears IA just nuked it outright without consulting anybody to see if any of it was backed up anywhere. The problem here isn't with Flickr, but the clear lack of professionalism on the part of IA in misusing others' resources and then pitching a fit when called out on it.