Why is gettyimages (and others) allowed to commit fraud?

There are several websites, such as gettyimages, that sell pictures and short pieces of video, and have literally millions of them.

When the pictures are copyrighted and these websites have the rights to them, then there's nothing wrong with that.

However, there are also enormous amounts of images being sold in these websites that are officially in the public domain.

Selling those images for money is not in itself illegal. "Public domain" means that you can do whatever you want with that material, and that includes selling it for money. There is no law against that.

However, gettyimages, nor any of those other similar websites, are disclosing the information that those images are actually in the public domain. They are not disclosing the information that you could find the exact images elsewhere and can legally use them for whatever you want without paying a penny to anybody. Instead, these pictures are being sold for money as any other picture.

That is, in my opinion, at least borderline fraudulent.

However, that's not the actual fraud that I'm talking about here.

You see, gettyimages (and probably those other websites) are actually sending demand letters to people who are using the public domain images, as if they were infringing on their copyright. They are demanding money from those people and are, rather obviously, not disclosing in those letters that the images are actually in the public domain.

Recently a photographer who had donated tens of thousands of her photos to the Library of Congress, thus making those photos public domain, got such a demand letter, for using one of her own photos. She had no contract with gettyimages, she had never granted any particular rights to that website, she was the author of the photos, and those photos were in the public domain (because of her having donated them to the Library of Congress). In other words, gettyimages had zero rights to those photos, and they had got them from the Library of Congress archives, which are publicly accessible. Yet they were demanding money for the use of those public domain photos.

That is fraud, plain and simple.

She sued gettyimages. For an inexplicable reason the judge dismissed the case with the excuse that "public domain material can be sold for money", ignoring that making demands by falsely pretending to own the rights to the photos is fraud.

So yes, now quite officially gettyimages and other similar websites are legally allowed to commit fraud. They are legally allowed to extort people for money for the use of public domain material, by pretending to own the rights that material (which they don't) and not disclosing the fact that it's actually in the public domain.

It's astonishing.