Its not just me, games used to be better

[Davros]

If you buy a physical thing, you cannot make an exact copy of that thing and then either return the original or resell the copies.

Yes you can in many cases it's just usually it's not practical
example heres a poster a physical product I can absolutely make an identical copy

Heres a candle

again possible to make an identical copy

Heres a Monstertech Hotas desk mount (I bought one) and apart from 2 custom cut 4mm steel plates (which I could easily get made) it's all off the shelf components easy enough to make an identical copy

have to figure out how to fairly protect digital asset creation in the same way we protect physical asset creation.

We have it's called the law, other products manage to survive without additional protections no need for an eula

 

[see colon]

Those physical things require you to have the materials required and some amount of skill to reproduce, though. Making a candle is not drag and drop. And reproducing a poster, besides the cost of the oversized printer, won't ever actually be identical. If you scan it, you will pick up imperfections and anomalies from the original prints microscopic spatter pattern that get amplified. And it's highly unlikely you will be able to replicate the original poster identically anyway, because paper stock and printers vary quite a bit from what's available in the commercial space. You can make a copy, but that facsimile won't be as identical as the Doom .wads I pulled from those floppies all those years ago, and at essentially 0 cost, have installed on every computer I've owned since.