We're speaking about digital work...

One aim of digitalization is to get data that is perfectly transferable and copiable.

Now if you want to artificially and needlessly make the copying cost some megajoules of energy, you will undergo the anger of people with a common sense an ecological sensitivity.

The whole concept of paying to get copies of music/art/whatever is broken, and to ”fix“ it we are bending the very laws of nature. Until recently it was still quite harmless, even the DRM you can live with, but now you need to prove you performed the combustion of tons of CO2 to become owner of a digital copy? To keep enforcing the unenforceable we are committing planet-scale suicide.

No, the real way to go, is the one of Patreon etc, where you pay to help succeed artistic endeavours.

To more specifically address the problem of ownership, as it is based on "declared ownership" anyway, with no real way to prevent non-owner to use the artwork (except by seeing that it is not theirs and punishing them, but then you don't need sophisticated devices for that), just embed the owner name in a copy signed (e.g. with a public RSA key) by the author, and that's it.

For transferablity, you can use the public key of a marketplace instead of the author's public key, so that the marketplace can take back the artwork (and reimburse you) and sell it again to somebody else with their new name embedded instead.

See? I can do all of that just with asymmetric ciphers.