"Look at any photograph or work of art. If you could duplicate exactly the first tiny dot of color, and then the next and the next, you would end with a perfect copy of the whole, indistinguishable from the original in every way, including the so-called 'moral value' of the art itself. Nothing can transcend its smallest elements" - CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Ethics of Greed", Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
That is because many people not only value the molecular setup of things but also their causal history, what transformations things underwent.
In that case, its history would be that it started off as atoms, was transformed into bits, and then was transformed back into atoms again. If the transformation were truly lossless, people familiar with this fact wouldn't care. Now, this specific example sounds silly because we have no such technology applicable to the Mona Lisa. But consider something like a mass-produced CD. You could take a CD in Europe, losslessly rip it, destroy the CD and copy the bits to America, then send them to a factory to stamp another CD. The resulting variation would be identical to that between the original CD and one of its siblings in Europe. People are familiar with the technologies involved, and they value CDs only for their bits, so the copy really is as good as the original.
(Here I have even taken pains to state that the copy is not a burned CD-R, nor that the original was signed by a band member, or any such thing.)
But I would care if that happened to some sort of artifact I value.
"During World War II, the medals of German scientists Max von Laue and James Franck were sent to Copenhagen for safekeeping. When Germany invaded Denmark, chemist George de Hevesy dissolved them in aqua regia, to prevent confiscation by Nazi Germany and to prevent legal problems for the holders. After the war, the gold was recovered from solution, and the medals re-cast." - Wikipedia
Here is an example. Imagine there was a human colony in another star system. After an initial exploration drone set up a communication node and a molecular assembler on a suitable planet, all other equipment and all humans were transmitted digitally an locally reassembled.
Now imagine such a colony would either receive a copy of the Venus figurine digitally transmitted and reassembled or by means of a craft capable of interstellar travel. If you don't perceive there to be a difference then you simply don't share my values. But consider how much resources, i...
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