By default copyright exists so by doing nothing you are copyrighting your work and preventing people who want to be in the legal clear from being able to use it (OSS games for example).
The best you can do is watermark your art with CC0 and/or include the license or a link to it in the file metadata.
But pretending we are living in a post-copyright utopia severely limits the reach of your work.
I'm not pretending copyright doesn't exist, but I want other people to be able to interact with my work as if copyright and other forms of IP didn't exist.
There doesn't seem to be a perfect way to achieve this. The problem with CC0 (and I believe the reason OSI doesn't approve of it) is that it says:
> No trademark or patent rights held by Affirmer are waived, abandoned, surrendered, licensed or otherwise affected by this document.
Whereas many licenses can be interpreted as an implied patent license[0]. I guess adding an additional declaration saying something like this could fix that:
> All trademark and patent rights associated with this work are permanently waived.
But I have no idea if that would work and it's frustrating that there is no simple way of opting out of intellectual 'property' ownership all together.
The closest, at least when it comes to software may be 0BSD considering large corporations like Google are willing to accept it.
The right copyright gives is a monopoly on distribution and on granting of conditional permission to distribute. The right is the monopoly itself, not the ability to do it. If you waive that right, you're saying that anyone is allowed to distribute and to grant permission to distribute. An author of a work in the public domain can license their work to someone under any license -- as can anyone else.
Freedom to me is whatever exists in the absence of coercion. GPL licenses depends on coercion, so they cannot produce freedom as I see it.
To illustrate this, imagine an alternative universe where violence is impossible. In this universe IP as we know it including copyleft licenses couldn't exist as violence or credible threats of violence by a state (or similar entity) is required for enforcement. I want to get as close to this hypothetical universe as possible by avoiding everything that depends on violence and coercion as far as possible.
The only thing that the GPL family prevents is coercion, effectively reaching a local minima of coercion-by-others as a function of coercion-by-vendor.
Granting the freedom to coerce doesn't reduce coercion.
Not distributing source code is not coercion. GPL forces people to do work in exchange for a promise that they will not be subject to volience, that's coercion.
You're right that in a universe where everyone grants their end users necessary freedoms and don't use coercion to limit those rights, GPL would be completely unnecessary. Until that happens, coercing people to stop further coercion is the best thing we have.
I'm taking about a universe where violence is impossible. Not a universe where people are compelled to distribute source code whenever they have distributed a binary file.
I'm fundamentally opposed to the idea of forcing people to do what I want and that's the clear purpose of GPL.
Somebody not doing what I want is not coercing me. I'm free to use or not use a binary distributed without it's source code, or I can try to reverse engineer it. Forcing them to do the additional work of sending me the source code would be coercing them, it would be impossible in my hypothetical alternative universe, and it would be wrong in this universe.
Your definition of freedom seem to be other people doing what you want them to do. That's not how I see freedom. Someone offering software as a service is not a threat to anyone's freedom. Preventing them from doing so by the threat of state violence makes both the business and it's potential customers less free.
The best you can do is watermark your art with CC0 and/or include the license or a link to it in the file metadata.
But pretending we are living in a post-copyright utopia severely limits the reach of your work.