Transferring an ownership right to a copy of a copyrighted work from a physical object to digital media

Abstract

An ownership interest in copies of physical artifacts is acquired from a set of owners. Each physical artifact contains a copyrighted work. The acquired ownership interest in the copyrighted work is transferred from at least a subset of the physical artifacts into a corresponding subset of digital content media items. The acquired ownership interest in the copyrighted works is leveraged to permit a set of consumers to access and utilize the subset of digital content media items. One or more computing devices execute a set of one or more functions to ensure a quantity of the consumers permitted to concurrently access digitized content of the digital content media items never exceeds a quantity of the acquired ownership interests acquired from the physical artifacts.