That would be nice, but there's a loophole in it that says that so long as a publisher tries to get in contact with the present holder of the copyright, assuming the death of the author means it's in the hands of his/her family, then they can go ahead. You have to prove they didn't try to contact you, and it's both nearly impossible and prohibitively expensive unless you hold a massive intellectual property.

Unrelated, but something I learned from directly being fucked over like this just last week.