Note that Star Trek faces potential liability from allowing fan film makers to assert their copyrights. That's got to be one reason for the decision to discourage it.
Example: Suppose Star Trek Discovery makes an episode about a character who dies, but is "resurrected" as an advanced hologram of himself, and has to come to terms with that.
The morning after it airs, Eric Busby files a lawsuit against CBS/Paramount alleging copyright infringement of "The Sum of One's Memories," episode 2 of The Section 31 Files from Darker Projects. (Busby would never in a million years do this, and especially not now that he has distanced DP from fan works -- I am only using him as an example.) Now, I'm willing to bet darseks to doughnuts that only a tiny fraction of the people in this thread have ever heard of The Section 31 Files, much less listened to "The Sum of One's Memories" (my favorite episode of theirs, for what it's worth). And, if a bunch of hardcore nerds like you haven't heard of it, how many people at CBS have?
Yet Busby does own the copyright on all original elements* in "The Sum of One's Memories," because that's how the Berne Convention works. So he could conceivably have just enough grounds to litigate. (He'd lose in the end, because he'd never be able to prove CBS had prior knowledge of his work, but the litigation would be costly.) And that would be an enormous headache for CBS.
This is one of the reasons, incidentally, why Star Trek eventually had to shut down its open script submission program, though they valiantly kept it open for years after the lawyers told them to close it. A freelance writer would submit a script; the writing staff on Star Trek -- without ever having any contact with the open submission department -- would make an episode with similar elements; the freelance writer would decide Paramount stole his idea and sue; Paramount would invariably make the problem go away, but at no small expense.
I always thought Trek should bring back the submission program, but with the stipulation that you forfeit all rights to sue Paramount over anything related to it if they don't purchase it.
Anyway, I'm going off-topic. Point is, there's a strong CYA element at play in the provisions against copyright assertion. I can't blame CBS for including it.
*Just the original elements, not the Star Trek elements. Separating the two is a court case in and of itself, but suffice to say that there are some copyrightable and therefore copyrighted elements in any episode of unlicensed fan fiction, which, under current IP law, are owned by the author, not the IP holder.
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) to the ongoing litigation.
