The metadata legal conundrum from a public records act perspective

Abstract

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) allows the release of public records inclusive of metadata. The agencies fulfilling FOIA and Public Records Act (PRA) requests are having challenges appropriately interpreting metadata because of the technological complexities involved. The Washington courts appear to be deliberating inconsistently when addressing metadata related cases. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the metadata interpretation on a set of court cases; and propose a framework that can be leveraged to achieve consistency across public records requests that include a metadata component whether explicitly or implicitly.