But that's the whole point: if you can make atomically perfect copies, then "the particular bunch of atoms Da Vinci put together" becomes meaningless. There is no such thing as "a particular bunch of atoms" in a world where the technology exists to make atomically perfect copies. "A particular bunch of atoms" is every bit as meaningless as "a particular bunch of bits", and for exactly the same reason: atoms, like bits, are actually states, not things.
Edit: Another issue is that objects aren't immutable. Let's say that we could make "atomically perfect copies". But those copies would remain "atomically perfect" only briefly. And then they'd be historically distinguishable. And OK, I borrowed that from Hoffstadter's I Am a Strange Loop.
Do you see people paying huge premiums for "the first instance" of a digital image?
It does if that person understands physics. If you can make an atomically perfect copy, then insisting on "the original" is just as silly as insisting on having "the original" of a digital image.
> You can't just arbitrarily claim something universally lacks meaning like that.
I am not "just claiming" it. I have cited an extensive argument in support of that position:
http://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.ht...
Yes, is it unintuitive. But there are a lot of unintuitive things in physics that are nonetheless true.
As far as the interstellar trade goes, they would need to trust the seller. Or trust third-party experts to authenticate it. That's all that any art buyer can do.
Regarding some particular release of Word, perhaps there is a disk somewhere containing the original compiled binary. I doubt that anyone has considered such stuff memorable, but who knows? Also, given how disk storage works, that arrangement of atoms wouldn't have persisted very long. So it's not such a useful distinction for software.