Talk:Exif

Why does the recommendation suggest embedding a URL to a third-party (non-creativecommons.org) site that mentions the image's license, rather than suggesting the inclusion of an explicit license statement? This seems like an unnecessary indirection/dependency; if the URL goes offline for some reason, there's no way to tell how the image is licensed. It also reduces the ability of search engines to detect how a "discovered" image is licensed; with an explicit license statement embedded in the image metadata the search engine can determine the license independently; if the license is only referenced via a URL the search engine has to be able to parse all the possible ways the license could be displayed on the referenced page.