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Well, from one standpoint, it (CC-SA,AR) is just another license. It grants some rights that come out of copyright ownership. If you abolish copyright law, then you have no rights to grant. It becomes a free-for-all. There is nothing to license.
It's pretty explicit in the US Constitution; I'm not aware of what the original British or Canadian laws said. Encourage people to make their creativity publicly available for the public good instead of restricting to private distribution, by granting them the right to control the terms of distribution for a limited time, and allowing them to profit if they so wished.
It does bug me that I don't know much about the history of copyright in my own country. I know of only one book about Canadian copyright law that is aimed at non-lawyers.
One thing I am sure of is that copyright, in some ideal, restricted form, is all that stands between the growth of public knowledge and the privatisation of all creativity by the corporations.
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