What I really wonder is if we replaced copyright laws with plagiarism laws, how would that shake out? That is, you can distribute my work however you want, but you can't claim it's yours, and you can't claim that I'm being compensated if you charge for it.

The question I think is interesting here is: can you still be an author without being lucky enough to gain celebrity that you can slurp value out of (e.g. endorsements, etc.)? Certainly there would be plenty of freeloading. I don't think there would be much reselling, except for extremely low margin stuff on the level of print-on-demand, because it would be easy enough for buyers to just get the content for free. But there would also certainly be social pressure to compensate creators for their work.

What I wonder is how that balances out when CC-BY is the norm and not some weird thing that most consumers are learning about for the first time when they see a donate link.