Agreed. It's annoying that we need special permissions on old public domain artwork. Depending on where you're at they can't prevent you from using it freely. In the US at least there is precedent that exact digital copies of public domain works are not able to receive copyright protection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel...). Though this isn't universal throughout the world (https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/07/25/wikimedia-sweden-freed...).