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1. Introduction
Recent years have seen a meteoric rise in individual consumption of digital media content, including e-books, digital music and digital movies. Thanks to the advancements of streaming technology, online advertisement and digital rights management (DRM) measures, content providers can offer tailored pricing schemes and different types of value-added services for distinct groups of consumers. Consumers increasingly seem to favor these services, but what does this shift toward digital media and away from tangible media mean for consumers' rights of ownership over their media objects? The involvement of digital technologies, the contractual agreements and the nature of the transaction through which ownership rights are transferred to the consumer all complicate the reality of owning a piece of digital media. Digital content consumers have much less control over their after-transaction usage of media when compared to consumers of physical media, who have certain clearly understood legal rights, such as reselling and sharing, to their own “copy” bestowed by copyright and property laws.
There are good reasons for content providers to exert control, including protecting copyright and preventing piracy. However, many scholars have expressed concern about DRM restrictions and the erosion of users' rights (Lessig, 2004; May, 2007; Gillespie, 2007). This trend is only aggravated by the general shift from the ownership paradigm to the access model, which characterizes the “post-ownership economy” (Belk, 2014, p. 1599) or “the age of access” (Rifkin, 2000, p. 1). Despite this concern among scholars, there has not yet been sufficient empirical study of whether consumers understand and care about their digital ownership. Research has shown that users do not read end-user license agreements and may be unknowingly signing away their rights (Bakos et al., 2014); but the non-readership is usually due to psychological factors rather than indifference to consumers' rights (Plaut and Bartlett, 2012). Research has also demonstrated consumers can and do develop feelings of ownership towards certain digital technologies and content, including social media, gaming, online communities and software applications (Kirk and Swain, 2018). However, consumers' sense of ownership of digital objects, such as e-books and streaming music, is a different matter and worthy of separate studies. Digital media objects are often not as personalized as the digital virtual possessions (e.g. avatars and game scores) and self-created digital...