IPRs indices in general developed to measure the quality or strength of IPR institutions across countries usually do not differentiate between de jure and de facto IPR institutions. In addition, they neglect the different impact these individual variables comprising these indices might have by simply averaging all variables or assigning arbitrary weights. The main contribution of this essay is to shed light on the relative importance of individual institutional variables in forming the de facto institutional framework of IPR protection as opposed to their de jure counterparts mainly focusing on Copyright. For that purpose we discuss the drawbacks of the common indices and offering some suggestions for building more reliable ones. Our main recommendation is to look at the formal copyright institutions in a more careful way to be able to code the different provisions that we think are probably most influential for Institutional Quality and that would enable better enforcement. Second: Countries must make data available about the enforcement process of Copyright laws and number of piracy cases filed in courts and the imposed sanctions in order to be able to develop a de facto measure for the quality of copyright institutions.