thecolorsblend said:

This is about an artist's moral right to not have his/her work tampered with.

And what I'm saying, perhaps too obliquely, is that the only way an artist can actually achieve that is to never let anyone else see their art. Tampering through interpretation happens the second another human eyeball sees it. Tampering through more direct means (editing, co-authorship) happens with such pedestrian regularity that most don't even consider it tampering most of the time. If an artist has the moral right to not have their work tampered with, it is very much like the right for men to give birth to babies a la Life of Brian. Yeah they've got the right but it never happens.

If you put a work out in the public space, it will be parroted, parodied, sampled, remixed, etc. If you're lucky, because that means it has meaning to someone else. As long as it's not some sort of attempt to fraudulently pass something off as the original, I've got no problem there. You can even parody it yourself twenty years later, just don't pass it off as the original.

EDIT: This means that IMO fan edits are EXACTLY the same as the Special Editions, by every moral measure except fraud (except that there's the special case for Star Wars of it being just rude to fan edit what may someday be a lost film). They only differ in quality.