A Word of New Legal Importance: Metadata

Craig Ball, a member of the Law Technology News editorial advisory board, is a litigator and computer forensics/EDD special master. He provides a detailed explanation of metadata, a word of new importance for its use as legal evidence, at law.com.

Here is the gist:

There are two principal strains of metadata: application and system, both invisible to a reader of the document.

Application metadata is information typically absent from the printed page and embedded in the file it describes, moving with the file when you copy it.

By contrast, system metadata isn't embedded in the file it describes, but stored externally and used by the computer's file system to track file locations and store demographics.