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Originally Posted by DiapDealer
That is what those who specify CC0 have essentially done. I'm unaware of any legal mechanisms where an author can choose to release something as "Public Domain". That's why CC0 exists.
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The creator / publisher simply states that they waive all copyright and the work is in the Public domain. Otherwise by default ALL work is copyright. Note in MOST countries there is no need to "register" a work, that only applies to Trademarks, patents, registered designs (Design patents in USA) etc. The USA unilaterally decided that new works have to be "registered" to have full copyright protection.
Copyright rules and laws are covered historically by International treaties and conventions and also local laws. In some countries violation is a criminal issue (may have maximum tariffs or be damages based) and in other countries it's a Civil law issue which means the Rights Holder (not the Criminal Justice system) has to sue someone and prove damages (usually without limit). So in countries where copyright is civil law the rights holder will only sue those reselling, sharing or uploading, not an individual downloading or buying a physical item in the shop or market as the damages would be only the profit on the one off sale.
So any published work should have a copyright notice or else people could claim they thought it was Public Domain. There can instead be a disclaimer that the work is released to the Public Domain. One can upload a brand new ebook you wrote to Gutenberg or the library here by asserting you relinquish all copyright and place it in the Public Domain.
Any copyright ebooks offered free can't be legally uploaded or shared. People absolutely need to download their own copy while it's free. Free doesn't mean Public Domain.
Also Public Domain content can legitimately be sold. Of course publishers of paper content (or ebooks) might reformat it, or edit, or add illustrations, in which the edition has copyright but the original text is still public domain.
So CC0 is an affectation. It's no more official than Public Domain and CC itself has no independent basis most places (all places?) simply relying on copyright law. By default "All rights are reserved", but the ©2020 An Smith etc notice should say so. Any relaxed rights should be stated in the copyright notice and that's all BSD Free, GPL, GPL2, Apache, CC etc are, just predefined copyright relaxations that someone thought up that entirely relies on copyright law.
You can't impose conditions not part of copyright law, though a sale can involve a contract which has conditions. Any such contract conditions can't abrogate people's local rights (such as EU Sale of Goods Act or Distance Selling, also almost every EU ordinance has to be enabled as national law by a nation's parliament, the EU is not a Federation like USA or a Confederation).