Should Pirate Latitudes Have Been Published?

Should Pirate Latitudes have been published? Jane Julius Honchell raised this question last week in an interesting article on the perils of posthumous publishing. She makes some good points.
The heirs don't really need the money and we don't know if the author (Crichton) would have approved of releasing the book in its current form.

However, I am glad that it was published. There are three reason why this is the case. First, I enjoyed the book; perhaps not as much as Jurassic Park. But I enjoyed it. Second, I have been making the case that Crichton has attempted to write in a variety of styles, perhaps mimicking the styles of other authors. Pirate Latitudes provides us with yet another example of this.

But one of the things I found most interesting about Pirate Latitudes was the fact that it was clearly not ready for publication. There are endless amateurish mistakes that a master like Crichton would not have made in a final product. These mistakes give us insight into the writing process and help us understand why a master is a master.

The real question here is who really owns the work of an artist? Not from a legal perspective but from a moral perspective. Next time I will argue that once the writer is finished with a work, it is owned by the readers.