Because I'd never sell them to you, do you have the right to take my fancy clothes without paying for them?
Another clothes-maker, noticing the popularity of your design and the growing frustration of your customers (and potential customers), creates clothes that look and feel exactly like yours, and make them available with free shipping online within a few hours of you making new designs.
Your customers (and potential customers) who don't live in Santa Monica, or those who can't make it to your store during business hours, or those who take public transit—frustrated with the roadblocks you've put between your clothes are their wallets—start buying from the pop-up e-tailer.
You complain about how this (and this alone) undermines your business. Your customers say you forced them into it. Neither of you is right.
People waving fistfuls of cash in your face isn't a bad problem to have.
And, no, that won't stop piracy. Some people just don't want to pay for something if they can get it for free. But those people are not taking dollars away from your income statement: they never would have bought in the first place.
A better comparison would be counterfeiting your fancy clothes, rather than stealing them, because piracy isn't theft, it's "copying".
Many elements of fashion design are not eligible for copyright in the US so it's conceivable that your design (minus the logos, etc) could be legally copied and mass produced by someone else who is willing to sell to customers that you are not. To me, that's a closer parallel to what is happening in the movie/tv industry today, except that in the media industries, copying the product costs virtually nothing, meaning everything is available as a copy, and distribution costs virtually nothing with the right technologies. Even more strange, those customers, who judging by the success of iTunes, Amazon and Google music stores, are perfectly willing to pay despite high quality, convenient, free copies being available a couple of clicks away.
I think most people follow a pretty simple ideology with this stuff: If you give me a way to pay for a TV show that moderately compares to the experience of watching the pirated version, I'll pay. If you refuse to sell the product to me in any way, I will not feel guilty about downloading one of the six different versions in three different file formats available to me via some other source. Your customers understand that as a business in the media industry you had a choice: (1) Give me a way to pay you or (2) Don't. Unfortunately, option #2 just means I now have to choose whether or not I'm willing to do something that, in my view, is only "morally questionable".
N.B. I don't like the use of "right" here I think it's ambiguous. Are we talking about laws, morals etc.? For simplicities sake I'll use "right" in my reply.
I also don't like the idea of trying to force digital goods to act like physical goods.
A better comparison: should the parent have the option to copy the clothing style when making their own clothes? As it happens, the limits of copyright permit that, though that constitutes less of a metaphor and more of just different parts of the same copyright law.