Copyfree is not dependent on copyright.
The US Copyright Office has this to say about copyright:
Copyright is a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States (title 17, U. S. Code) to the authors of "original works of authorship," including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works. This protection is available to both published and unpublished works. Section 106 of the 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right to do and to authorize others to do the following:
- To reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords;
- To prepare derivative works based upon the work;
- To distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
- To perform the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works;
- To display the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work; and
- In the case of sound recordings, to perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.
The key to understanding copyright is the phrase "the exclusive right". Empowered by the US Constitution, federal law provides for governmental protection of theoretically limited monopoly privilege for the creator of a work over that product of the intellect. The oft cited intent of that legal protection of monopoly privilege is to provide motivation for creators of original works to continue to create.
This justification for copyright law is based upon a number of assumptions for which no reasonable evidence of truth has ever been presented, and for which strong counterarguments exist. Thomas Jefferson, in fact, was known to question the wisdom of granting any even "limited" monopoly under the auspices of law. Certainly, the recent behavior of certain zealous copyright holders and their representatives as reported in the news has led many who have never done so before to question the ultimate benefits supposedly granted by copyright law. The proliferation and obvious quality of many examples of open source software also call into question the very premise that limited monopoly power is in any way necessary to promote innovation.
Regardless of the wisdom of copyright law (or the lack thereof), copyfree licensing may be described as licensing whose terms closely approximate the rights and freedoms one would enjoy if the licensed work existed in a world without copyright. As such, while the terms of many open source licenses explicitly depend upon copyright law for enforceability, the key point of copyfree licensing is that the intent of such license terms would be effectively satisfied if copyright law simply did not apply to the licensed work at all.