"Making sense" is not a well-defined concept: Different, contradictory things make sense to different people.
In fact, basing a society on "what makes sense" [to the party that has the power] rather than a written code of laws sounds like a recipe that will quickly turn a country into a distopian dictatorship.
Please pardon my momentary lack of precision. It was brought on by a lack of legalistic thought.
Substitute "logically consistent and practically workable, along with distinguishing between physical property and ideas" for "makes sense". By "logically consistence" I mean derivable from a few clearly stated axioms or assumptions, and a few primitives, like "and", "non-exclusive or", "negation" and a rule of deduction like modus ponens.
By "practically workable" I mean things like "having a fixed term", "having a central repository" and "clearly marked". Allowing rather extensive excerpting also seems necessary to preserve what
The current US standard of "author's life + 70 years" leaves a lot of uncertainty about when some material enters public domain. Having a copyright mark on stuff, rather than the automatic assumption of copyright would help eliminate a lot of uncertainty. Having a central registry where one could (automatically) get confirmation of copyright would help. The automatic presumption of fair use or fair dealing when an excerpt is used, rather than fair use as affirmative defense, would reduce lawsuits-as-free-speech suppression. Getting rid of the "property" part of "intellectual property" also seems like it help reduce problems, just because the concept of possession of an idea is false to fact, and causes people to make false assumptions.
I freely admit that even in the face of a logically consistent, confusion reducing copyright regime where free speech is assumed to trump copyright, some lawsuits would still come up, and indeed, be necessary.
I think that the current arrangement in the USA guarantees the use of courts of law to suppress opinions. The current arrangement also guarantees a majority of illogical outcomes, by almost any standard of "logical".
Aren't most of the stupidest "IP" conflicts actually conflicts between what makes sense and what "the law" says?