It's obvious that IEEE wouldn't accept such papers. Like any publisher, its business model is based on ownership of copyright. So this is a bit of a tempest in a teacup.
Instead, let me offer a more interesting factoid: to the best of my knowledge, in the United States, and probably in certain other countries, there is no such concept as a private individual dedicating a publication to the public domain.
Documents fall in public domain when the owners' copyrights have expired. For the federal government, the expiration is immediate. For everyone else, there is no legal mechanism for hastening a document's copyright expiration. [This is why it's foolish to "put software in the public domain". You haven't actually done anything at all.]
"IEEE is the world’s largest professional association dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity. IEEE and its members inspire a global community through IEEE's highly cited publications, conferences, technology standards, and professional and educational activities."
The "obvious" thing, consistent with their stated mission would be to try to disseminate useful information to the largest number of people, like, say, Wikipedia or Khan Academy.
It's sad and shameful that they put profits above "advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity".
Bringing up the Creative Commons in this respect is sort of undermining your own argument. CC0[1] is a license acknowledging that, while it may be legally impossible to voluntarily and irrevocably extinguish copyright in works in which copyright naturally subsumes (putting a work into the public domain proper), as is the case in Canada under the Copyright Act (R.S.C., 1985, c. C-42), to the extent possible under law, you make a grant of license equivalent to usage rights for works in the public domain. The results are similar, but the universal grant of license is revocable within the lifetime of the copyright (that is, the license may be withdrawn, and use after the withdrawal that is not ongoing from the period of the license would be subject to explicit grants of license).
"Just as there is nothing in the law that permits a person to dump personal property in the public highway, there is nothing that permits the dumping of intellectual property into the public domain — except as happens in due course when any applicable copyrights expire. Until those copyrights expire, there is no mechanism in the law by which an owner of software can simply elect to place it in the public domain."
If you look carefully at the Creative Commons' CC0 license, and its associated documentation, you see that Creative Commons is fully aware that they're being... optimistic. See:
"Dedicating works to the public domain is difficult if not impossible for those wanting to contribute their works for public use before applicable copyright or database protection terms expire. Few if any jurisdictions have a process for doing so easily and reliably. Laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as to what rights are automatically granted and how and when they expire or may be voluntarily relinquished. More challenging yet, many legal systems effectively prohibit any attempt by these owners to surrender rights automatically conferred by law, particularly moral rights, even when the author wishing to do so is well informed and resolute about doing so and contributing their work to the public domain."
and:
"CC0 helps solve this problem by giving creators a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law." [note the couching st the end]
and my personal favorite couching:
"While we can't be certain that all copyright and related rights will indeed be surrendered everywhere, we are confident that CC0 lets you sever the legal ties between you and your work to the greatest extent legally permissible."
I'm not sure how a "factoid" can be prefixed with "to the best of my knowledge," but here is some cold hard fact for you:
A work can enter the public domain via expiration or forfeiture.
EDIT: A bit of clarification. Some people get confused because copyright actually affords you two different sets of rights: Economic rights, which everyone is pretty much on the same page about (once your work is in the public domain you can't charge for it later). You also get moral rights (right to attribution, right to maintain the integrity of you work, etc). These rights vary wildly by jurisdiction, but are rarely the ones that get argued when a work is in the public domain.
Graber, H. B., & Nenova, M. B. (2010).
Intellectual property and traditional
cultural expressions in a digital
environment. (p. 173). Edward Elgar
Publishing.
> to the best of my knowledge, in the United States, and probably in certain other countries, there is no such concept as a private individual dedicating a publication to the public domain.
http://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html says otherwise, backing it up with citations to court decisions and jury instructions. Dan, by the way, is no stranger to the courts; the legal battle he fought for a decade is the reason that you can export strong cryptographic software from the US today without registering as an arms dealer and getting approval for each download.
Your comment is full of other errors. The IEEE, for example, is not a business. There are others I cannot be bothered to correct at this moment.
If you want more reading than just the links provided search for stuff related to SQLite. The source code was released to the Public Domain, and I believe that they have written about the various pitfalls of this (notably, you can't voluntarily dedicate a work to the public domain in Germany, IIRC).
Instead, let me offer a more interesting factoid: to the best of my knowledge, in the United States, and probably in certain other countries, there is no such concept as a private individual dedicating a publication to the public domain.
Documents fall in public domain when the owners' copyrights have expired. For the federal government, the expiration is immediate. For everyone else, there is no legal mechanism for hastening a document's copyright expiration. [This is why it's foolish to "put software in the public domain". You haven't actually done anything at all.]