Comment by JohnFen

This is an excellent point. OSS licenses only work because of copyright. The intention was to kind of "judo" copyright law to benefit sharing. If the work is uncopyrightable, no license of any sort applies to it.

Before I started running with the OSS crowd, I wanted to put my code in the public domain. I quickly learned that isn't a thing with US copyright law. Any time you create a new work (of the sort that isn't specifically excluded from copyright) it is immediately and automatically copyrighted by you in that instant. If you don't want it to be, tough. It's copyrighted. The best you could do was apply a permissive license.

But now, perhaps there's a workaround for those who really want to be something they made in the public domain: claim it was machine generated. There's an interesting thought...