The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) have launched the Embedded Metadata Manifesto to promote the protection of information in digital media. From the media release the key principles are:
1. Metadata is essential to describe, identify and track digital media and should be applied to all media items which are exchanged as files or by other means such as data streams.
2. Media file formats should provide the means to embed metadata in ways that can be read and handled by different software systems.
3. Metadata fields, their semantics (including labels on the user interface) and values, should not be changed across metadata formats.
4. Copyright management information metadata must never be removed from the files.
5. Other metadata should only be removed from files by agreement with their copyright holders.
Photographers should embed their rights and usage inside their images and expect users to respect that data and not have it stripped out.