Well, its not that simple. It does establish something: that he retains his rights in his copyright and has no intention of allowing it to fall into public domain. Like I mentioned in this thread previously, if you have knowledge that someone is infringing on your intellectual property rights, you must assert those rights (by filing lawsuits if necessary) or else you risk losing those rights and appearing to have acquiesced to having your intellectual property become part of the public domain.
So (in addition to winning some money) he also made it legally clear that he still retains his rights in this photo, and thus no one else in the future can use the photo and legitimately claim that they thought it was "abandoned" to the public domain. That, I'm sure, was the real victory, not the money. This would be particularly important for an older artist, because copyright protection extends to years after the death of an artist.
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