> You are conflating copyright with free expression.

No, copyright is a direct infringement on free expression. We've just tolerated it because the trade off was worth it. Not worth it because people would get rich and that was import to us. Worth it because having a chance to make money on a creative work encourages the creation of more creative works and having more creative works was important to us.

I'm sure that there were many times in history when someone came up with a good story and got mad that somebody else told a version of that story that others liked better. Not only is the ability to share stories more important than that one guy's feelings, but the result is better stories for everybody. Once people starting selling their creative works and it became easier to copy them we agreed that it was important that people had an opportunity to make money off their efforts so we'd have more works and that's where we started limiting people's freedom. When those limits are reasonable, it's a good deal. A balance where briefly people wouldn't be able to copy someone's work so they had a chance to make money and then later everybody could do whatever they wanted with it.

Recently the media industry has bribed their way into making the restrictions increasingly unreasonable, but we still want people to be able to have a chance to make money on their work so we just need to readjust to something more like what copyright started out as and less like what it's become.

> No one has standing to sue you if you decide to sing in public a Michael Jackson song.

That's wrong. There are performance rights (see https://copyrightlately.com/glossary/public-performance/) and it just requires you to have a public "audience". This is an issue that cover bands (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/rocking-without-regrets-truth...) and karaoke singers run into and the way it's handled is that the venues are typically licensed to allow it.

Performance rights were what kept restaurants from singing happy birthday to their customers or paying Warner/Chappell for the privilege until a lawsuit clarified that they didn't have the rights to the song in the first place. By that point they'd already collected 50,000,000 in license fees though because performance rights are real and enforceable.

Realistically, nobody is going to sue you for singing a copyrighted song in public around others, but they could and there's a decent chance you'd lose that legal battle. Similarly, many small businesses will have a radio on or a CD playing that their customers can hear. They can be sued for that as well. Enforcement in that setting is rare enough though that small players take their chances, but big companies with fat wallets are prime targets for lawsuits so they tend to have a licensed solution to avoid massive fines.