Exactly! I recently took a series of photographs for an exhibition, which were of access land owned by a city council. Should I expect to pay them for permission to use the pictures? It seems an absurd idea. Almost everything is owned by someone these days, but an artist owns the copyright to their work unless they deliberately relinquish it.

Do film makers have to pay copyright on every public location they use?

Did Ansel Adams pay the U.S. National Park Service for his landscape photos? I doubt it!