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> In the current legal system, you can enforce restrictions on the usage of this binary [from a public domain source], and can forbid redistribution, reverse-engineering

IAAL and am pretty familiar with U.S. copyright law, and am curious where support for this proposition in the law is found. Can you provide sources, please?

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I don't know the US law (I live in Germany), but the intuition is clear:

1. Take some CC0/public domain source code.

2. Build a binary out of it and sell licenses for your software.

Case study: SQLite's source code is public domain. On the other hand, it is embedded in many commercial software products that are sold - and you are not allowed to reverse-engineer the software or redistribute binaries of it. This would be possible/allowed in a no-copyright world.

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