Lock metadata/copyright information in an image?

Consider: if the metadata could actually be locked (it can't, because the image rules say it is simple plain text), then the user could simply use Copy/Paste into a new image.

A PDF password is worthless too; if you can see something on screen you can copy it. This is unfortunately the world we live in.

A lot of the problem is with the standard image file formats themselves. JPEG, GIF, PNG might be the only formats you can use on a website, but those formats don’t provide any way of locking the metadata.

Even if there was a way to lock one document’s metadata, the quick and easy workaround for stripping all of your metadata is to open the image, select all, copy, and paste into a new document. Because metadata is at the document level, pasting into a new document makes the pasted content take on the metadata of the new document. And I haven’t even mentioned Photoshop because I think it works that way in all image editors.

Perhaps you'll find this useful.

https://www.copyright.gov/registration/photographs/

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In a word, no. If someone has the image, they can do whatever they want with it. Depending on your country, you may have to register your copyright with your government to get legal protection.

There are some schemes such as Digimarc if you want to throw a lot of money at the problem.

Learn about content credentials if that's perhaps something you look for, how ever in Photoshop (Beta).

Under the Berne Convention, copyright is automatic to the creator of the work. There is no formal or legal reason to include a copyright mark! It is legally just as well protected without.

It is much more important to clearly mark who the creator is, in metadata or otherwise.

The copyright mark is mostly used in the US, because US legislation has imposed some minor limitations to legal "post-processing" in case of infringement, if the work is not registered. But the copyright still applies and that in no way means the work can be used by others.

In other words, everything is copyrighted unless explicitly released.

No. Copyright is a subject of legal regulation. Metadata fields are not the only way to prove that you own the rights to an image.

You can use steganography or service headers inside the file to embed information there, but what's the point? The further you hide the information, the less likely it is that someone will be able to get it (including you, if the image is modified)