Protecting Multimedia: The Rising Importance of Metadata

Multimedia is content: So it makes sense you would protect it like you would any article or publication. But when you want people to share your images or video, it’s hard to know how to protect your rights as creator.

This brings up the issue of permanent metadata.

Metadata is data about data, or more comprehensively, data within an image or video that tells you about it: who the author is, where is originated, etc. You can find this data by looking at a video or image’s properties and looking into its advanced settings. It’s really not as complicated as it sounds. This information is also used by search engines to know exactly what an image or video is about (because search engines don’t have eyes or ears). SEOs call these alt tags and use them frequently to improve search engine’s understanding of a website, and in turn, search rankings.

The issue is this metadata isn’t permanent. It can be altered by anyone at anytime, making protection nonexistent if anyone had the inclination to eliminate your digital affiliation with your work. It is for this reason hardly anyone even uses them.

What is needed is software to make this metadata permanent: a digital thumbprint that would be irremovable from the multimedia. This thumbprint could then be read by search engines and knowing the originator’s site (which would be embedded in the metadata), could boost their rankings, making sharing seamless and responsible. This eliminates the idea of “orphaned” multimedia and protects creator copyright.

Here’s an example. Say you’re a photographer and you post a really cool image of a Starbucks coffee cup. You then share than image and it goes viral, until eventually Starbucks sponsors it in a paid social-ad campaign. Search engines value shares and recognize them as proof that content is valuable. Your website then, which you linked into the Starbuck image metadata, would then get boosted to the top of the search result for whatever keywords were discerned as significant in the meta description.

Cool, huh? There's even more.

While also protecting the creator's work from being used in other campaigns as it no longer being categorized as "orphaned" or unclaimed, permanent metadata could result in further business for the creator as their contact information would be easy to find if a business were so inclined as to contact you to purchase it.

The hurdle is that many businesses like the idea of free "orphaned" images that they can use for marketing purposes. And these business have clout. The hope is that in the future, businesses see that this protection not only protects the Instagrammers but extends to big business as well. That if this metadata became permanent, and a significant piece of that digital Internet structure, they would no longer need their high-power legal teams to protect their assets; they would protect themselves. An innovative idea we should all be able to get behind.