Count me as another "stop being so dismissive of these lawsuits, there's a plausible claim here" voice. Claiming some kind of ownership right in public domain

Count me as another "stop being so dismissive of these lawsuits, there's a plausible claim here" voice. Claiming some kind of ownership right in public domain images, and hence implicitly or explicitly representing to people that if they use those images without paying they can get sued, seems like straightforward fraud. It's no different than if I set up a toll booth on a public sidewalk, with a big official-looking sign saying "I own this sidewalk, and you have to pay me a dollar to walk down it." People who reasonably believe my misrepresentations as to my ownership of the sidewalk and give me money have at least pretty plausible good old-fashioned fraud claims. The argument of the linked article, transposed to the sidewalk toll booth context, seems to roughly be "Getty didn't put up a sign saying they OWNED the sidewalk, they put up a sign saying 'License for sale to this sidewalk which we have the rights to sell licenses to' and the silly plaintiffs shouldn't have read it like a normal person to be a claim of ownership; instead they'd should have read it in the unnatural way that Getty wanted to trick them into not reading it as." Or, in tort lawyer language, as the claim that their reliance on Getty's claim of ownership wasn't justified. Well, this sounds like a jury question to me.