[Purpose/significance] This paper aims to study the influencing factors on the first stage (the ethical cognition stage) of making decisions when the user faces the dilemma of primary digital resources on the web. [Method/process] The university students in Inner Mongolia were designed as the research object, and three typical problems of the intellectual property of the primary digital resources of the network were designed in the form of a situational questionnaire. After the data were collected, the reliability analysis, validity analysis and variance analysis were carried out to find out the influencing factors of the cognitive process of the intellectual property of the network primary digital resources. [Result/conclusion] The results show that from the perspective of individual characteristics, among the three factors of gender, education, profession, only education has a significant impact on the network primary digital resources’ intellectual property cognition process.