don't we have algorithms that can smart crop an image to preserve points of interest? Could that be used to keep text at the top or bottom of an image. Ugly as that may be.
Depending on the relevant law and contracts, that may be as bad or worse than removing the attribution: the artist may consider the “uninteresting” parts of the image to be vital to its overall composition and object to the tampering— Even something as simple as traditional cropping can be controversial in this regard.
Maybe a standard to put attribution text and its location in metadata, so that the cropper can know that it's cutting it out, and know what it has to put back in?
