Would you pay a premium for "the original" of a digital image?
The difference lies in the state of the object. Over time, it will degrade, change, be impacted by it's environment.
A copy, can be thought of like both the photo and a physical object.
In the photo sense, a capture sufficient to exactly reproduce the object is no different from the photo. That's just data.
In the physical object sense, the moment a duplicate exists, it begins to diverge from the original, which makes the original an authority. Future copies will differ from prior ones.
From there, they would diverge.
Three things happen:
One, the data capture representing the object gets dated, and would represent the original at some point in time, not as it is today.
Two, the copy objects would also diverge from both the data and the original.
Finally, the stories related to the objects differ.
The original remains the authority on that particular object. For many things, nobody would care, and I agree with you on all of that.
However, you very seriously under estimate the value history and culture have. And you also are ignoring how a story becomes intertwined with a given object.
As an extreme example, one could say there was some war, and one of the copies of a famous painting was damaged in the war, but owned by someone who won that war at great personal cost.
Now, we've got the original, with historical value, and one copy in particular with value, both above and beyond that value any other copy may have.
For those interested in, perhaps involved in, that war, the relevance of that specific copy, with the damage marks on it, where it's at, who owns it, all differentiate that copy from all other objects.
Things that are exactly the same do not remain the same.
And where that is true, originals will have value above and beyond copies.
Consider this scenario: instead of scanning the object, sending the information to some remote location, and recreating the copy at the remote location, the copier works like this: you put an object in, and after some time two objects come out, each atomically identical to the original. Now you really can't tell which is which.
In the case of remote-copy you can tell the difference. But would an alien race really care enough to be willing to pay a lot more for "the original"?
There's actually a similar situation going on right now in the diamond market. DeBeers has spent a lot of money trying to convince people that natural diamonds are somehow better than artificial ones despite the fact that they are absolutely indistinguishable from one another (and so DeBeers is putting a lot of money into developing technology that can mark "authentic" diamonds). IMHO this is a pretty transparent scam, and people fall for it largely out of stupidity or ignorance of chemistry. I believe (or maybe "hope" is a better word here) that any society that can travel to the stars will have moved beyond such foolishness.
To ignore that would ignore the change of things over time in the meeting associated with them. Whoever has the original is the authority on the state of the original, the copies are copies derived from that Authority. They have context in meaning only because of that original.
Whoever owns that, owns the culture and the story behind the original. That is something one can purchase and it does have value even though there are no physical differences. The original will diverge from the copies if anything just because how it's capped and where it exists in the universe.
Say there was a pan galactic radiation blast of some kind. And the original. Slightly contaminated. That's part of its history now, the copies wouldn't have been similarly tainted. Just one example.
People value stories, and we work to maintain them in their continuity. That is what the original represents. It can be purchased it does have value. This is not a physical thing.