Sure, we can record light/sound/voltage/physical signals to more durable media, and we can distribute copies of those recordings, but the value isn't in the med

Sure, we can record light/sound/voltage/physical signals to more durable media, and we can distribute copies of those recordings, but the value isn't in the media used to record the signal; the value is in the desirability of the signal. To be more concrete, imaging two arrangements of light in a fiber; one is ~20GB of randomly generated noise and the other encodes instructions that a Nintendo Switch can interpret and present as the Zelda game Tears of the Kingdom. The random noise arrangement is much, much, much (!) cheaper to create than the TotK arrangement, which took 5 years of labor from a massive team to create, but people seem to like the TotK arrangement a lot more, and I don't know if it would have been possible to get that much labor allocated to arranging those bits without some technology that enables an entity to finance the labor and hopefully recover more than their costs (that technology being a legal construct that grants the entity entity exclusive ownership of the right to distribute TotK-arranged bits).