There should be a choice: either the legal system protects your IP (copyright), or you do (DRM). I don't necessarily agree with that premise, but even if we ac

There should be a choice: either the legal system protects your IP (copyright), or you do (DRM). I don't necessarily agree with that premise, but even if we accept it for the sake of argument, I don't think the legal system does effectively protect your IP in many copyright situations, so what happens then? As an analogy, if you told every store that to prosecute the theft of a bar of chocolate they'd have to employ specialist teams to track down the individuals and then spend a thousand bucks on legal fees to bring a private prosecution, and at the end they might only get back the cost of the chocolate bar and a bit of token compensation, do you really think thieves would be deterred effectively and the store properly protected in its legal rights? And yet we usually define copyright as a civil matter in most countries, other than sometimes in cases of large-scale commercial infringement, rather than a criminal matter like theft. Stores might or might not employ a dedicated security guard, but if the guard does see a theft, the rest of what happens after the police are called is mostly going to be handled and paid for by the state. It makes a viable deterrent against large numbers of small-scale offences. Such a deterrent doesn't usually exist in the case of copyright infringement.