Fair Use: Who am I paying for this Fair Use?

Who really owns a digital work? I wish I owned every digital work I ever downloaded onto my computer. I wish I could say it was mine, but unfortunately, I can't. Well, at least not yet.

So, if I buy a song from iTunes, how long is it mine for? Good question. It probably depends on how much I paid for it.

I download a .pdf orginal of a magazine artical that I'm using for a paper, off of JSTOR. Then, it's on my computer forever. Now, is this mine? I don't think so... I thought the music was mine. Yet, it seems to be the other way around. And did I actually pay for the database? Well, in a sense, yes, because I paid AU and they paid for the database.

Yet, here's this "middle man" concept again that Adam pointed out in class that is so prevalent and hindering to so many people in actually obeying the law.

So I get confused. I don't know where my money is going, and even then- does any of the money that AU pays for it's access to the database actually go to the people whose works are contained in said database? For example, gradesaver.com will buy your papers from you for $25, but you have to hand over all the rights to those papers, which they then in turn sell to hundreds of other people for about 1/5 of that price. So what's so "fair" about this "use", is what boggles me. I see big profits for these middle men, and hardly anything for the producers of work. Then again, if they didn't sell their work to a database, would anyone pay anything for their work? Tough questions. Lit-101, what is the best way to remedy this confusion about "fair use"?