The end of ownership?: An investigation of users' preferences and perceptions of ownership configurations

Abstract

The notion of ownership of digital media content is complicated and fragmented, because of the interplay of intellectual property law, personal property rights, and contractual arrangements. Drawing from the existing literature on theoretical analysis of ownership, we present a framework with multiple ownership configurations of digital content. Using the online survey method, we investigated US users' perceptions of ownership of digital content, users' perceptions of the importance of various digital rights, and their preferences for different ways of obtaining media content. The results of this study show that downloadability and the continuity of rights together determine users' sense of ownership, and digital rights management (DRM) restrictions play a minor role in users' perceptions of ownership. Ownership, especially owning something physically, is still important to users with regard to books. With music, ownership is also important, but access, especially through the subscription model, is gaining in importance. Movie content shows a different pattern where users generally favor the access model over ownership. The study also found that users' perceived importance of digital rights varies with their preferences for obtaining different types of content.

Do I Own It? U.S. and Chinese college students' digital ownership perceptions

“…Aligning with the results of previous research (Zhu & Cho, ), users' perceptions of digital ownership, on the whole, look like a spectrum, along with the level of restrictiveness of users' rights in the different ownership configurations. Participants tended to agree that they owned the purchased, DRM‐free copies, which is the least‐restricted ownership configuration.…”

“…It is worth mentioning that previous research by Attas (2006), Watkins et al (2016), and Zhu and Cho (2018) considered transferability and continuity as another dimension-a form-of ownership rights. For example, the right to possess can be transferred to others.…”

“…In this study, we modified and simplified Zhu and Cho's () framework by combining some rights that have similar restrictions and by splitting “DRM‐enabled copy” into two configurations—software dependent copy and hardware/device dependent copy (see Table 1). Simply put, we summarized the major ownership configurations in today's digital media content market into six typical categories: (1) purchased DRM‐free digital copy, (2) purchased software‐dependent copy, (3) purchased hardware/device‐dependent digital copy, (4) purchased content hosted by the content provider, (5) subscription allowing temporary downloads, and (6) subscription content hosted by the content provider.…”

“…In this study, we modified and simplified Zhu and Cho's (2018) framework by combining some rights that have similar restrictions and by splitting "DRM-enabled copy" into two configurations-software dependent copy and hardware/device dependent copy (see Table 1). Simply put, we summarized the major ownership configurations in today's digital media content market into six typical categories:…”

Buy, Subscribe, or Borrow? Consumers’ Use Preferences for Information Products

“…What factors are related to users' preferences? This paper reports research findings concerning users' preferences for obtaining different types of information products or media content (books, music, and movies) from two surveys, which were part of a larger project on users' perceptions of ownership, digital rights, and media preferences (Zhu & Cho, 2018). In particular, this paper answers the following research questions: (1) What are the participants' general preferences for obtaining different types of information products?…”