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Comment by awestroke | Hacker News Reader

I thought this article would go into how exif data is stored in different image formats, different value types, interesting peculiarities with the format etc. This article is not interesting enough to be on hn.

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I expected to read about the legal and licensing aspect.. e.g. is Metadata of CC Images also licensed under CC? I never found a proper answer.

Is metadata even covered by copyright?

Generally not. I guess you could insert a poem into an EXIF field, which would be covered by copyright. But the data inserted by cameras is straight facts, not artistic expression. Thus it isn't covered by copyright.

I don't think it can be that simple. The photo is just a list of facts about the light incident to a small region of spacetime.

Photos are full of creative decisions of the photographer (framing, timing, etc) so we consider them a work of art. But if a painter draws a bridge the thing that copyright protects is the painting, not the info which bridge it was out when it was painted.

You could make a compelling case that CCTV footage is just information without artistic input. That argument has a Wikipedia section discussing it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality#Pre...

I generally agree that Metadata does not fall under copyright, with these aspects. But it is more nuanced.. the Geotag, for instance: It was the photographers choice to move to this location, as it was the photoraphers choice to trigger the shutter at exactly that date_taken_time, as it was his/her decision to upload at specificly that upload_time. All of these aspects reflect individual choices, and individual choices are a reflection of our identity and creativity (ask Susan Sontag).

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