So yes, I do feel a bit bad for small independant artists who watch the standards bodies work themselves into a fury to protect video and audio content while they have to deal with Google Image Search and 9gag.
Doing the same for still images adds a ton of work for little payoff. And it still doesn't prevent anything. At least in video if the system remains uncracked, it's hard to make a copy. You can't just point a video camera at a screen and get good results.
Whereas for a still image? Pretty easy to reconstruct the exact pixels, 100%.
Anyways, this is doomed entirely. They provide the case of social media sites stripping off metadata. Well guess what, if your DRM is gonna prevent them from modifying the image, it's gonna prevent them from loading the image in the first place. Even if the JPEG folks add it, it has zero chance of going anywhere. You'd need support from the hardware, OS, and on up. (Like video has.)
It never was show-stoppingly hard. Push comes to shove, if MAFIAA invents something really good to stop you from copying a file, someone in Shenzhen will make a physical screen recorder that captures subpixels directly off your monitor and turns them back into data.
The only things of value in the non-physical world are monopoly, reputation, and customisation.
I'm not sure this was ever the case in Western society for all but the top 1% of artists in any given time period.