It makes as much sense as me claiming ownership of any old number, let's say 1005. Nobody else is now allowed to use 1005. Ever. It's mine now.
Is that fair?
1005 is a common number. 4 digits. A 1000x1000 photo is like a million-digit number. The analogy really doesn't make sense. 1005 is also easy to generate and can encode many different valid meanings. the huge number that codes that photograph probably only codes to that one, meaningful thing, and is basically impossible to generate accidentally. Probably generated once in the history of the universe. The "it's silly to say someone owns a number" thing doesn't really scale up from small numbers, to the level where we are talking about complex artworks.
Photo, movies, songs, games. They're all a number.
Where do you draw the line though? Should a company that spent $100 million making a movie get no protection at all? After all that was just a number, and numbers already exist in a theoretical sense, nobody "owns" them.
If we allowed free copying from day 1, sure we'd still get movies and games. But forget any detailed stuff, it'd only be indie quality at best. We might still get Lord of the Rings, but with papier mache swords and make up like early Romero zombie movies.
Also for this picture in the thread, I think there's a big difference between fair use laws / policies, and claiming something is public domain. If it's public domain, anyone can exploit that for personal gain. Nobody is going to be stopped from looking at that picture if it's copyrighted, if they want to. That's the difference between recognizing something as copyrighted or public domain. It's who is allowed to
commercialize the work.
That guy did spent a shitload of money to fly to the other side of the world with expensive equipment expressly for the purpose of taking photographs, which is his profession, they didn't happen entirely at random and just fall into his lap.