(We inherited the terms of use from the old LessWrong so while I tried my best to understand them, I don’t have as deep of a sense of understanding as I wish I had, and it seemed more important to keep the terms of use consistent than to rewrite everything, to maintain consistency between the agreements that authors made when they contributed to the site at different points in time)
The moral rights include the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work.[1] The preserving of the integrity of the work allows the author to object to alteration, distortion, or mutilation of the work that is “prejudicial to the author’s honor or reputation”.[2] Anything else that may detract from the artist’s relationship with the work even after it leaves the artist’s possession or ownership may bring these moral rights into play. Moral rights are distinct from any economic rights tied to copyrights. Even if an artist has assigned his or her copyright rights to a work to a third party, he or she still maintains the moral rights to the work.[3]
What exactly these rights are seems to differ a bunch from country to country. In the U.S. the protection of these moral rights is pretty limited. From the same article:
Moral rights[17] have had a less robust tradition in the United States. Copyright law in the United States emphasizes protection of financial reward over protection of creative attribution.[5]:xiii The exclusive rights tradition in the United States is inconsistent with the notion of moral rights as it was constituted in the Civil Code tradition stemming from post-Revolutionary France. When the United States acceded to the Berne Convention, it stipulated that the Convention’s “moral rights” provisions were addressed sufficiently by other statutes, such as laws covering slander and libel.[5]
Concrete instances where I can imagine this waiving becoming relevant, and where I think this makes sense (though this is just me guessing, I have not discussed this in detail with a lawyer):
An author leaves a comment on a post that starts with a steelman of an opposing position. We display a truncated version of the comment by default, which now only shows them arguing for a position they find abhorrent. This could potentially violate their moral rights by altering their contribution in a way that violates their honor or reputation.
An author leaves a comment and another user quotes a subsection of that comment, bolding, or italicizing various sections that they disagree with, and inserting sentences using [...] notation.
(We inherited the terms of use from the old LessWrong so while I tried my best to understand them, I don’t have as deep of a sense of understanding as I wish I had, and it seemed more important to keep the terms of use consistent than to rewrite everything, to maintain consistency between the agreements that authors made when they contributed to the site at different points in time)
The Wikipedia article on Moral Rights:
What exactly these rights are seems to differ a bunch from country to country. In the U.S. the protection of these moral rights is pretty limited. From the same article:
Concrete instances where I can imagine this waiving becoming relevant, and where I think this makes sense (though this is just me guessing, I have not discussed this in detail with a lawyer):
An author leaves a comment on a post that starts with a steelman of an opposing position. We display a truncated version of the comment by default, which now only shows them arguing for a position they find abhorrent. This could potentially violate their moral rights by altering their contribution in a way that violates their honor or reputation.
An author leaves a comment and another user quotes a subsection of that comment, bolding, or italicizing various sections that they disagree with, and inserting sentences using [...] notation.