Because... Mark my words closely... When you steal my car, you deprive me of my car. When you take a picture of my picture of a lamborghini, you deprive me of nothing except for the artificial right to charge you for the right to take a picture of my picture of a car.

The moral consequences differ because the consequences differ.

If you are in the market of selling pictures of cars and you take a rare (in fact, entirely unique) photograph of a car, then someone else takes a picture of your picture and sets up shop next door to give them away for free, they have deprived you of your ability to earn money from distributing that which you invested in the creation of. Just like diluting your equity in a company, they have not taken your physical property (or shares) but they have taken value from you regardless.

Or let's say that I am the brother of El Presidente, and I run the state monopoly on cigars, and farmers grow tobacco and sell cigars directly to tourists, they re depriving me of the value of my mnopoly.

But they aren't depriving me of my tobacco. The two are different, which is why the morality of the two are different. Nobody denies that being able to get the police to enforce a monopoly has value, but it's not the same kind of value as the ability to enjoy smething for its intrnsic value to the owner.

Different kinds of value, therefore different kinds of morality. I'd say that the right to monopolize bits has nothing to do with the bits and everything to do with taxation or rent-seeking.

You're comparing someone selling a similar product that they had to grow on their own land using their own resources to someone taking a product that is completely unique and cannot be found in nature, and diluting your value from it down significantly without any financial repercussions to themselves. Apples and oranges.

I would think that people view car theft as more morally consequential than copyright infringement because of its tangible nature. If someone takes a car, someone else is now missing a car. However, if someone were to illegally download a song, nothing irreplaceable is taken (i.e. the artist isn't deprived of the music they have created).

I would also think that the relative value of the items makes a difference ethically. Assuming a song has a value on the market of $1 and a car has a going price of $10,000, the car is four orders of magnitude more expensive. Imagine if only one person could own a song at a time, and that song was valued the same as a car. I don't think you would see the rates of copyright infringement that you see today. For this same reason, I disagree that if car theft became consequence-free, many people would do it. The moral consequence is derived from the value of the object you are depriving someone of; a car is far more valuable than a song. Additionally, there's the ethical consequence of depriving someone of transportation, while taking a song does not really have any effects on a person's quality of life.