"I was taught that a fundamental aspect of photography is... if you were there and shot it, it's yours & you should be able to create derivative works accordingly.(Ya, this doesn't apply to taking a camcorder to a movie theater.)"
Maybe the problem is anyone thinking they own any sort of rights at all in images, patterns, etc.
And it wouldn't be hard to say that images of London buses, Parliament or Big Ben were so iconic as to be stock. But of course, UK copyright law is involved here, and they probably don't recognize any such exceptions.
EDIT: I saw the judgement someone linked to and looked at the photos. Suppose that buses, Parliament & Big Ben are all considered stock. The view is different in both photos, it's quite hard to tell that the bus is on a bridge in the second photo, and the only creative element I can find that was copied was to put a red bus on a black & white photo of the same general location. It seems to me that item #71, along with mention that the second photo was introduced late in the game, could have tipped that towards the plaintiff.
...and let's not forget the ruling is about a postprocessed image. You can't take a picture and have it look like this case. You must specifically edit it to match.
Well, having one colored item and the rest grey is a fairly common way of making one item stand out in a photo.[1] When you break it down, it's not that creative a photo. They both take a black & white of an area with many iconic buildings, then make a London bus pop out of the background by letting it keep its color.
Item #71 tends to point to this particular case as being deliberate copying, but it's not exactly impossible to get a case like that from independent works when only so many elements were identified as being the same in both. It seems like the crux of the matter is not whether it was edited or not, but whether it was copied with the other photo as a reference or not.
[1] Google doesn't quite understand that as a query, but you can still find many examples of this technique scattered among many irrelevant results:
Maybe the problem is anyone thinking they own any sort of rights at all in images, patterns, etc.