Only speaking to motive, she only had one album out then. Arista could either roll the dice with a (public:sophomore, "reality":debut) effort performed by somebody who didn't actually have anything to do with the first album or milk Avril's untimely demise for everything they could get. Hell, they could turn the latter into a feature film. I don't see them getting that wrong. Maybe a smaller label entirely dependent on Avril, but not Arista.