In common usage today, "death of the author" refers more to the idea of declaring an appeal to authorial information to be invalid. If a reading or interpretation of a work relies on information about the author, then it is an invalid interpretation.
I have long since taken issue with this common usage. To deny that a literary work has an author is, first and foremost, to deny the human achievement of the work. All stories we read are written by humans, and can only be consumed through that viewpoint--we certainly cannot accurately imagine ourselves as a dog, or a highly advanced alien spaces, so humans are absolutely essential to the work.
Denying the author also leads to several cases of apparent contradictions which I will describe below.
But that isn't to say the whole concept doesn't have merit. It is extremely important to understand that, being a human, no author has full control over his or her own unconscious self. What the author may say about a work he has written could very well be false. And, most importantly, abstract meaning of a text relies on the interaction between reader and text rather than author and text, and so no reader need believe that the author's interpretations are any more valid than his own.
This image is occasionally circulated as a way for students to vent their frustration about literary analysts searching too deeply in text. These students make the error that the author is in full control of every aspect of himself, when the state of depression of the character may have unintentionally motivated the choice of a saddening color because it matched the theme. Strict usages of death of the author would deny analysis of why blue may be a saddening color--because that exists due to the cultural memes the author has internalized, which cannot be used in a death of the author analysis.
To use an example anyone reading this blog post would likely be familiar with, take Neon Genesis Evangelion, directed by Hideaki Anno. Anno has repeatedly stated that the Christian imagery seen throughout the show, of his own design, had no particular meaning. It is important that we do not take this at face value; Anno is known to have been extremely depressed during the production of Evangelion, and it is very valid to find meaning in the Christian imagery as Anno lashing out at God in frustration.
A less morally-acceptable example would be in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, controversial due to some interpretations of the book as Hitler apologia, building up Ender as a faultless genocider. Understandably, Card has denied this. But again, authors do not have full control over their unconscious selves, and they of course may also lie. Analysis of literature is incomplete without incorporating the author in some way, but despite the existence of "author" in the word, the author is not an interpretive authority on it.
But Death of the Author would deny this information entirely, and contrary to Barthes' goal, imposes a limit on the interpretation that can be had of a work.
Arthur writes a novel. In his novel, the narrator, also the protagonist, grows up in an orphanage after his parents die when he is young; he is occasionally visited by an uncle, his only living relative. The uncle is mentioned only in passing. When the protagonist grows up, he has difficulty forming intimate romantic connections; critics suggest that the protagonist was molested by his uncle and that memories of the events have been repressed.
Arthur, seeing the reviews, is shocked. That was not at all what he had intended; the uncle served as an unintentional role model for the protagonist, who learned emotional detachment due to this uncle not having any love for him. So he writes a second edition of the novel, this time removing the uncle entirely, and emphasizing that the protagonist's emotional issues stem from a lack of family.
This situation poses problems for Death of the Author. It is simple enough to deny authorial intent and still get meaning out of a work, but that intent has now been turned into an official re-write of the text. Therefore, to deny the author's influence, one must dictate that the two editions are completely separate stories and have no relation to each other--something that is clearly false. A story is just an author speaking in an official capacity as the author; denying the author entirely leads to problems like this one where the same story must be considered as two unrelated ones.
Another problem can arise, as well. Alice is a prolific author, praised by social equality types as writing stories that feature strong instances of oppressed people; she is particularly known for her protagonists being a symbol of the feminine and overcoming masculine oppression. To expand her horizons, she writes a new story, from the perspective of the masculine.
But she fails. For whatever reason, she cannot effectively write from a masculine perspective, and her protagonist once again ends up as a symbol of the feminine, agreed upon by critics all over. Death of the Author limits the analysis of the work that can be done under the assumption that the protagonist is a symbol of the masculine. Without a hint of what the author intended, the very idea cannot be found, as the symbol of the feminine is so strong. Particularly, it would declare the masculine reading invalid as it is unsupported in the text.
But clearly, there is useful analysis and interpretation to be done from the perspective of a failed masculine. Interesting parallels can be drawn between an attempt at the masculine and what it ended up as. But by completely disregarding the author, this analysis is impossible. To add to that, if a critic hears of the author's intent and then performs a text-only analysis based on it, he or she has still failed Death of the Author, as the analysis was motivated by the author's existence.
To conclude, understanding that the author is not an interpretive authority on their work is critical to a complete analysis of literature. Even factual statements rather than interpretations about events in a story are not necessarily completely at the whim of the author; they may misremember a detail and say something happened that is directly contradicted by the text. When this happens within the text itself, we usually call it a "plot hole," and other details of the text are used to fill in information to correct the contradiction. If this is infeasible, then it is a damning indictment of the work.
But to completely destroy the author entirely limits both the human achievement of the text and the human reality that shaped it. What aspects of the author a reader may find useful are up to him or her--and indeed, the reader may decide to use no aspects at all. But axiomatically declaring that the author cannot be used is highly stifling.
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