Dead hands keep a closed book
From the Times Higher Education:
The zombies wander the land; the lone survivor tries desperately to find support and resources. This might describe any number of films, but it also acts as a metaphor for the contemporary editor or biographer dealing with the undead of literary estates. The creative artist is long deceased, and what lives on is the administration of the literary estate, mechanistic in its movements and predatory in its actions. The literary estate uses the letter of copyright to disadvantage the scholarly work of editors and biographers in ways that the spirit of copyright does not justify.