I would go and say that when flickr will be gone we will enter a different era of the web. Flickr has been such a great influence over the years that internet without flickr will be a different internet altogether
I sort of agree with you but in another sense it remained true to its roots as a photo publishing platform, mostly, for amateurs. But the mass market was fine with putting some pics up on facebook. And serious professionals have other markets more explicitly aligned with their needs.
Friendster pre-dated it by 2-3 years, MySpace and Facebook by a year.
I have to agree with product50, I am an avid photographer but Flickr was never compelling for me. I would only ever see it when someone would post a link to Facebook...
The BBS predates all of them.
Scroll to "Innovations" on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeviantArt.
I refuse to use photos I don't have a right to use so I can jump on Flickr and get the right photo license for what I need.
In this scope a public repository of photographic data is one embodiment of this potential. Just changing the behaviour of this single embodiment does very little to affect the fabric of the internet.
Maybe there are social bubbles for whom flickr is much more important but if I had to list any number of internet services that I consider markable flickr would have not been on that list.
Whereas tumblr is built on - literally made out of - the reproduction of images without the permission of the copyright holder.
There's no RIAA or MPAA for photographs that has the clout to force platforms to redesign their systems to pro-actively check for copyright infringement.
(I'm trying to scrupulously avoid saying which side is right here, just describing the situation)
Why would an amateur care about copyright? The whole point of copyright is to grant a monopoly to a work's creator in order for him to make money. If he's trying to make money, he's not an amateur (viz., someone doing it out of love — hence the word).
An amateur certainly wouldn't care about the market for commercial photos!
I don't know of any other tool or service that makes it as easy as Flickr does for my wife and I to collectively maintain a library of family photos. I will happily maintain my Flickr Pro subscription for as long as the service stays in business.
It's now too easy for corporation to rip off the work of photographers, so I removed the content I had online, and will only post the odd photo to my G+ these days. Not the 'stream' of stuff I used to do with Flikr back then.
What laws are these?
Because the UK has signed the same international copyright treaties as US and most of Europe etc.