There were data brokers who literally paid people to transcribe phone books before OCR was a viable option. That was protected, as data isn't copyrightable. It

There were data brokers who literally paid people to transcribe phone books before OCR was a viable option. That was protected, as data isn't copyrightable. It isn't hard to argue that case law metadata is no different even though it includes textual descriptions (themselves taken from public documents).