> The physical book feels like it's worth something. The digital copy doesn't. People have a moral intuition that they should pay you in the first place, and that they should not in the second, and legality is largely just the formalisation of our moral intuitions.

If this were the whole picture, it would be legal for anyone to take the text of Harry Potter and print their own copies of it. Or all books with the same physical "feel" would cost the same.

In the US, its constitution motivates copyright and patent law pretty clearly "[t]o promote the progress of science and useful arts." At least in that sense the laws are to ensure that people have some incentive to actually create new stuff and ideas. Furthermore, people inherently attribute value to the information within or else you would not see price differences in content with the same physical feel.