Author rights wouldn’t be an accurate term. Copy rights do not necessarily belong to the author, even when they are alive. Distribution rights or “distrights” would make more sense for your argument.
In Germany copyright law there is actually one provision for the real transfer of copyright: death. So as far as copyright is concerned, the transfer of copyright requires literally death of the author - which might get a chuckle out of people into media studies.
I prefer it to a name that's more accurate because it signals what the purpose of the law is, which I consider more important than its implementation.
Now that I think of it that also works quite well when naming things in software. Don't name things after their implementation, when you can help it.