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I have often described fanfic as the mythology and folklore of the modern world. Captain Kirk is the equivalent of what Hercules was to the ancient Greeks, a hero that everyone knows about and so can be an archetypal hero in anyone's story.
Copyright is a very unnatural imposition on how this aspect of human culture has worked throughout the vast majority of history. It really annoys me when people discuss what elements of a setting are "canon" and fall back on the authority of the legal system, rather than what the collective will of the fandom feels is the correct course of things. Imagine if someone had "owned" Poseidon and had suppressed the Iliad because Homer was doing unauthorized things with the character.
I would argue that the "owner" of the mythology does have a stake in keeping the stories "authentic". In those ancient days, sure there was no copyright, but there was heresy, which was effectively the means by which the writers protected their core IP like Poseidon and Zeus, the Bible and Gospels etc. Otherwise these stories would not have survived the millenia mostly unaltered.
Take Poseidon's trident away and give him a sword and people aren't going to be impressed. They might even kick your ass as Poseidon was supposed to be a real god at the time.
If you wanted to write non-canon fic back then, you made your own in-universe characters like Odesseus or Hercules and if you were lucky, they became adopted as part of the Greek Mythology expanded universe. But you had better write the gods as they were intended, or you could be exiled or worse!
Likewise today, a world like Star Trek has in-universe rules that you can't break or else your fic becomes non-canon, and you may be mocked or "exiled" from the community.
But the point is that it's the people who aren't going to be impressed. Not some random "rights holder" that has that title only due to an arbitrary shuffling of tokens of value that happened out of sight in some hidden office or courtroom. Churches may try to declare particular ideas to be heretical, but if the general populace goes against those declarations they quickly change their tune or get schismed.
If someone back in ancient Greece had somehow "bought the rights" to Poseidon and decided that from now on he'd wield a sword (so that he can sell Poseidon-branded swords or something), he'd have been ignored. People would keep telling tales of Poseidon's trident, and the tales with the sword would just vanish into irrelevance because nobody would retell them.
Having seen things much like this happen to a number of franchises I've loved since childhood, I really wish this was still the way of things.