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"and use their considerable legal and financial resources to try to ensure that they get a favorable ruling."

I doubt there's any point to that; the courts basically cannot resolve this issue in any useful way within the current legal framework. The idea of handing out monopolies might have been useful when the point was to keep the kings friends rich and happy and the content controlled, but they simply cannot be reconciled with a free market economy and todays rate of technological and content evolution. As long as the system is tied to monopoly rights you only have the choice of who you're going to allow to screw everyone else (which fundamentally means, the more 'IP' we have, the more all of us are going to get screwed (and in slightly more economical terms, the more waste we'll get in the system due to monopoly inefficiency)).

It would be more useful to engage in actively trying to fundamentally restructure the 'IP' incentive system to a fundamentally non-confrontational incentive system. Look over the foundation.

Some say we need an incentive to be creative. While I personally disagree to a fair extent (and things like free software indicates otherwise), ok, I'll buy that maybe some people do need an incentive, and that some creative talent could be more creatively productive if they had a certain economic security. As the point of an intellectual incentive system would be to maximize creativity, that leads to the conclusion that we somehow may need to finance creativity beyond what a fully competetive market would do. So, say, a popular creative work of value to many people should conceivably generate enough revenue for the creator/participants to live off for a certain time (too short would be bad and an insufficient incentive, too long and there would be no (again, claimed) economic incentive to create further works (and spend too much on a single creative work, and you get fewer works for total economic resources spent instead).

So, how do we determine what works merit incentive? Let the free market handle it; works that get copied the most, ie, are most highly desired should probably be the first to receive incentives (until their useful payout is exceeded, the authors et. al die, etc, and the incentive no longer serves the creative purpose). As there would be no right to prevent copying anymore, there would be no particular reason to avoid reporting the numbers of copies being made, ie, it would free up anything from p2p networks through youtube, IPTV broadcasters, network radio broadcasters, etc, to record popularity of works and lay the foundation of who gets paid.

Then the final question becomes, how does one finance the system? First, realize that the current system is essentially a tax. The costs to the economy are very real and altho the copyright holders have a strong incentive to shut up about the actual costs to the economy, the billions they collect are as real as the billions the IRS collect. The difference is, with the billions the IRS collect, there's actually some theoretical and nominal responsibility and accounting of the costs to the economy and what they're used for.

As responsibility, accounting and some form of democratic control over incentive systems is generally regarded as a good thing, I'd say moving the collection of revenue and responsibility for the system over to the state agencies usually responsible for such things to be fairly reasonable. So where in the economy would it be most equitable to collect the funding? Personally, I'd say, where the money's made. IE, slap a tax on youtube ad revenue. Slap a tax on movie theatres. Slap a tax on IPTV revenues. In fact, slap a tax right over anyone who makes money off selling, distributing, or performing the works in question. As the works being played is recorded and accounted for (something which is already done in most cases), the funds gathered from display of that work will primarily be going to the creators of the work, making sure the incentive generated is both as equitably gathered and a