This is clearly one of those things I did to myself as a good idea, then forgot about, only to be plagued by it later.
I noticed that all of my photographs on my camera were reporting a copyright with a 2009 year inside the exif data.
I’ve been unable to figure out where it was coming from, resorting to exiftool to remote it.
My natural thought was that perhaps it was some preference in a photo editing tool or a geospatial locator tool. But, no. Turns out I did it to myself.
The Canon EOS Utility has a nifty ability to include a value for the Copyright tag. And about a year ago when I tethered it to the computer, I must have noticed this and set it to some precanned value that includes the year.
It looked something like this:
Copyright (c) 2009 by Walt Stoneburner, All Rights Reserved.
And ever since then, my photos were stamped with that value. Which was fine, back in 2009.
Fixing the problem was as simple as tethering the camera again and firing up Canon EOS Utility. It also gave me an opportunity to update the firmware.
Strange copyright exif data: mystery solved.