While I agree with you that photographers are hurt by having their photos copied I'm not convinced my app was a problem. I personally doubt anyone was using it to bulk download copywritten photos and somehow use those photos. I could be wrong but I believe most people that steal photos still them a few at time. Basically they're making some article, they need a related photo, they search, grab a 2 to 5 and stick them in their article. They'd do this with the browser, not my app.

My app didn't let you search by keyword, only by user. Further it didn't remove watermarks or do anything else. If photographers put their photos on flickr and they care about stealing they usually both watermark and only put relatively low-res versions there and you have to pay them for high res versions.

If flickr provided logs that showed bulk download and further some proof that even with bulk download that it was actually affecting professional photographers and not just a few geeks collecting some pictures they liked then I'd be more inclined to buy into their ban but without that I'm pretty confident the ban had no basis in reality.