You may be confusing "copyright" with "license".
The following is my own summarized interpretation. I am not a lawyer. You should read the
Bern Convention yourself. In addition, different countries have their own interpretations. The U.S.
DMCA is an example.
When you create something on your own, it belongs to you, and nobody else is allowed to decide what to do with it (especially copying it) until some time after your death. (The amount of time varies.) Copyright only applies to things fixed in a tangible medium. "Tangible medium" includes such things as paint on canvas, ink on paper, magnetic domains on a disk (e.g. hard drive) and stored charges in silicon (e.g. RAM and flash drives). Copyright does not apply to ideas or information (e.g. you can't copyright the fact that you're a particular height). Other forms of protection are available for them (e.g. patents and Trade Marks).
You can assign the copyright to someone else. Then that other person or corporate body gets to decide.
You can license the use of the thing in whatever way you want, but then you are bound by the terms of that license just as anyone else is. (That's why I always include the phrase "all rights reserved", for whatever good that might do.)
Unfortunately, copyright is very hard to enforce on the Internet. Too many people want to believe that once something is publicly available in some way, copyright no longer applies. They're wrong, of course, but that doesn't stop them from getting very emotionally invested in the idea.
