How does this follow? I take a picture (or make any other work of art), I have the copyright. This is outside of what is patented or not. They are not equivalent. Even in absence of the other, patents and copyrights do not offer the same protections.

Granted, the US patent system is broken.

They have differences but they are both forms of IP protection.

Citizens need some form of automatic IP protection or else anybody could (for example) copy someone's proprietary code and start offering a competing software service without any legal repercussions.

That would be completely wrong since the person who wrote the code invested a substantial amount of effort to write it. Someone who has better business connections shouldn't be able to just copy it and use it to launch a competing service... Such competitor could leverage their business connections to secure funding to drive the original author of the software out of business using their own work against them.