Historically speaking, the modern European conception of moral rights is quite far from being the "cornerstone" of copyright. And with good reason: they raise some rather significant problems which aren't present in jurisdictions which "lack" them.

You've piqued my interest, can you follow through: what are the problems of attribution and control over modification (and other moral rights?) that you're thinking of?

Well, to take one example which will be relevant to HN readers: moral rights pose real threats to open source software, since in many jurisdictions which have them they are considered inalienable and can be asserted even when all other rights are licensed freely. Thus, for example, someone who lives in a moral-rights jurisdiction and writes open-source code would still have -- regardless of the terms of the license -- the right to quash particular uses of the software, or the creation of forks.

This is why a number of larger open-source-supporting organizations have contributor agreements which include a clause stipulating that contributors will not assert moral rights against the projects to which they contribute.

Moral rights also interfere with uses that people in the US can largely take for granted; authors in moral-rights jurisdictions can, for example, quash parodies or satires of their work even if those parodies or satires would otherwise be permitted by the relevant copyright laws.

If a coders moral rights are inalienable to the extent that some right can be asserted after he has license away those rights then he cannot create open source software under certain licenses. If he can later demand attribution then he must choose a license that includes teh possibility of attribution - yes I can see this could be a problem. Do you know of any specific jurisdiction in which a creator can't license away the rights needed?