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.

How would that not be a concern regardless of what entity hosted it?

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.