A customer was looking to optimize their use of data that they received from a data object in the form of a STGMEDIUM. Right now, they are making a copy of the hGlobal in the STGMEDIUM and modifying the copy. But that memory block could be quite large. Is it possible for them to just modify the original hGlobal? What are the ownership rules for the contents of a STGMEDIUM?

The rule is that you call ReleaseStgMedium when you are finished with a STGMEDIUM. If you look at the details of the ReleaseStgMedium function, it behaves in one of two modes, depending on whether the punkForRelease member is null.

You can see that the model is that a null punkForRelease means that the medium is owned by the code that possesses the STGMEDIUM, whereas a non-null punkForRelease means that the medium is controlled by the punkForRelease. (In the TYMED_FILE case, the logical medium is the file on disk; the file name is always freed. And the distinction is irrelevant for IStream and IStorage cases, since the interface pointer is being released either way.)

This means that if the punkForRelease is null, you can just treat the medium as if you owned it. In the null punkForRelease case, all ReleaseStgMedium is going to do is free the hGlobal. You can rescue that memory just before it reaches the incinerator and use it for whatever purpose you like. It was going to be destroyed anyway.

On the other hand, if the punkForRelease is non-null, then you need to copy the memory and modify your copy, because the hGlobal is owned by the punkForRelease.¹

¹ The non-null punkForRelease case typically occurs when the data object that provided the STGMEDIUM wants to cache the data across multiple calls to GetData. It creates the data once and returns the handle to each caller, but setting the cache as the punkForRelease. (In most cases, the data object acts as its own cache, so it passes itself as the punkForRelease.)