Sorry, I really don't agree with this. It doesn't matter how big or small you are, any company has a right to crowdfund. Big companies have their own set of problems, and crowdfunding can be a way to help those companies solve them. The point of crowdfunding is to allow the "wisdom of the crowd" to determine what ought to be funded and what not to. In that sense, if enough people believe that a project is worthy of funding then it is worthy.
You're right in that nobody mentioned anything about legal rights.
The article in question, however, is titled "It's not okay for..." and alludes to corporations who supposedly are violating the 'moral rights' by participating in crowdfunding practices. The parent post is merely extending the debate regarding the same moral rights but taking an opposite stance, claiming that the right(not legal, but moral) is not exclusive to the start-ups.
In a “get the product" crowdfunder, as opposed to a "t-shirt and our eternal gratitude" one, them secretly being a large corporation would be my least concern.
In any case, that corporate crowdfunder could even be both at once: three low-tier engineers with an idea who got an undecided result in the internal pitch, a small budget for crowdfunding preparations and "all in" with a whole new department if that succeeds to raise n money.
Huh. The words "moral" and "right" don't appear in the article at all. And your use of "moral rights" does not relate to the meaning I'm familiar with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights
Whatever you think you're doing, just stop it. You're poking at semantics, when the intent is not at all hard to figure out.
Look at the article's title, where it says "not ok". Whatever that "ok" means for small companies to crowdfund, echan00 is saying that big companies have the same "ok". Call it whatever you want.
What I'm doing is pointing out the straw men used in this thread to attack something the writers don't like. I'm fine with disagreement, but I think it should be done honestly.
People here get all exercised about rights. So to wrongly claim that the original article is interfering with somebody's rights will get people falsely riled up. Making up a new definition of "moral rights", which is something else entirely, seems even worse to me. If echan00 and seankimdesign want to say it's ok, then they can just say it's ok. No need to puff up their claims.
The normal definition of "moral right" is equivalent to whether something is "ok". It's just "a right of the moral variety", not the legal term about copyright. That legal term is very much not the everyday definition.
People use a casual phasing like "they have the right to X" to mean that X is defensible all the time. It's not an attempt to mislead people about the article.
It's not going to have its own dictionary entry because it's two separate words and not a phrase.
The first few google results for [[moral right]] are about the legal term, but then there are many not about it. And while this is not the best comparison, I would assume that most pages talking about the legal term will have the word "copyright" on them somewhere. Is that a reasonable assumption? Because [["moral right" -copyright]] has almost as many results as [["moral right"]].
Dictionaries are not the only places you find definitions. E.g., the IEP has a dozen definition of concepts with "moral" in them, like "moral luck": http://www.iep.utm.edu/moralluc/
It doesn't have anything for moral rights used this way.
I think your google-counting approach is an ineffective way to get at anything. If you read the citations that come up from your suggestion, it's not at all clear that everybody's talking about the same thing. And some of them are definitely doing what I think seankimdesign: puffing up some other perfectly good concept by adding the word "right" to it to make it stronger.
So no, I definitely do not agree that the normal definition of "moral rights" is what you get when you subtract the actual normal definition of "moral rights" from the search results.
