Not a great analogy, since a digital copy leaves the original intact unlike your apples

Not only am I taking 1,000 apples, but I use those 1,000 apples to start my own orchard and encourage people to come to it instead of yours.

Yeah but if I program a drone swarm to automate this process it’s for the greater good — more apples for everyone!

And I only charge a tiny subscription for access to all my drone-managed orchards, you can eat as many apples as you want. But don’t steal any and start your own orchard or I sue.

All the people who care for the trees and pick the apples have lost their job while an apple became nearly worthless, but without a job it‘s still unaffordable.

Replace your drones with China or India and you have the current situation in the US.

Apple farmers go out of business so you lose the people who create new varieties.

... and somehow your garden did not lose any apple in the process.

But you are an apple seller

> but I use those 1,000 apples to start my own orchard

Steal cuttings, not the fruit, if you plan to start an orchard. From 1000 apples you'll get ~10 000 seeds, statistically you won't even end up with one good tree.

> An output of three cultivars from around 50.000 seeds means that 17.000 seeds were needed to get one cultivar. Only one out of around 9.000 scab resistant seedlings showed the appropriate quality to become a cultivar. This proportion underlines the enormous effort which is necessary to develop a new cultivar.

https://orgprints.org/id/eprint/13698/1/220-225.pdf

For every apple I take, you still have your apple on the tree, because my apple is only a copy of yours.