Those links are interesting but just show that Getty is a slimy business that tries to repackage public domain images for sale, not that they infringe the IP of others. That’s a massively different issue.
You'd think that should fall under the perjury penalty of the DMCA, I thought that misrepresenting oneself as the copyright holder was what that was for. But maybe they didn't file any such DMCA notice, I dunno.
Oh, I agree that it's a completely toothless provision in practice, but claiming the copyright on someone else's work and then trying to take down the person's own copyrighted work seems like exactly the sort of thing it was supposed to cover.
The article you linked makes the point that at least one civil suit did give damages for dealing with a bogus DMCA takedown, but that it was unrelated to the perjury provision.
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