Did somebody copyright a Star Trek script that wasn’t CBS/Paramount?
Yes, definitionally, anyone who writes a Star Trek script ever has copyrighted it, fanfic or official. Under American copyright law (let's not worry about international variations for the moment), any work that
can be protected by copyright
is protected by copyright by the act of being created. Formal registration is not required, but it does help if there's a dispute between two people who both claim to have created a given item.
That's why there's a rule in places where professional writers congregate (such as the Literature forum on the TrekBBS) to not share fan-fic or even post story ideas or concepts, because if something similar is used, even coincidentally, in an official product, it's an opening for legal action. Like, let's say I post that Star Trek 14 should have Khan and Kirk fight on the side of a volcano with laser swords, and Khan falls in, and has to wear a special spacesuit that keeps him alive and starts calling himself the Dark Invader, and then there's a subsequent Trek novel by an author who posts here with a swordfight on a volcano, it would open CBS/Paramount up to legal action on my part, even though my idea is ridiculous, stupid, and blatantly derivative. Even if I couldn't win, I could make myself a nuisance.
No, the design is not his. What he is identifying is his built quality.
Like if my carpenter friend makes a really good version of an IKEA furniture on its own, that's indistinguishable except for scratch marks, screw positions etc, and then that somehow ends up in an official IKEA commercial - there's literally nothing he can do - expect if course post on Instagram and say "look, I did that!"
That's not a great analogy. For one thing, designs can't be copyrighted. That's why high-end fashion brands have a habit of using their logos as a decorative element; you can't copyright the shape or materials of a purse, but covering it in the copyrighted (technically, trademarked) interlocking-C logo of Chanel gives you something that you can defend in court. So in this case, the illegal aspect would be using photographs presumably taken by your friend that weren't licensed by Ikea or their ad agency without securing a license to those images (whether or not the furniture looks like an existing Ikea piece or not doesn't matter), as well as false advertising and misrepresentation by showing furniture they don't sell in an ad, even if it appears similar to their own products.
The fact that designs can't be copyrighted is also why the whole concept of "Marc Bell stole from CBS/Paramount, so CBS/Paramount is stealing right back and two wrongs make a right" is incorrect. Arguing over how Bell's model is too Enterprise-shaped for him to have ownership rights but Bill Krauss's Shangri-La and Sean Tourangeau's Ares are different enough from the official products that they should have creative rights to them is a red herring. The shape and design are totally irrelevant legally, it's the actual object that's in question, in this case, the specific configuration of pixels, points, and polygons created by Marc Bell in the form of the CG model and textures.
Just to draw out the implications of this, that means that a VFX studio using Bell's TOS Enterprise model
is a copyright infringement against him even though CBS/Paramount, who commissioned the animation, owns the original creative products which that design was developed for and used within, and it would
also be a violation if the same company somehow got their hands on Tobias Richter's CG model of the Ares and used that without a license, but it would
not be an infringement against anyone if CBS/Paramount (or their agents) built their own model off of Tourangeau's design for the Ares,
unless they called it the Ares, because
that (the name combined with the visual design) would be an infringement on Peters' scripts for his Axanar stories, or they used Tourangeau's actual drawings on a computer screen or something (which happened early on in DSC when a specific version of the UFP logo drawn by Franz Joseph was used in an episode).
Then please tell me why Marc Bell is not suing CBS/Paramount for using his models without his permission.
Lawsuits are expensive and he hasn't judged the potential remedy as worth the time and trouble of retaining and lawyer and beginning a formal proceeding. Lots of people don't sue (or even report crimes) when they've been wronged for the same reason.
Stealing fan-art for official products is not uncommon, and part of the reason is, well, who's going to go up against CBS/Paramount or the Walt Disney Company or whoever even with a slam-dunk case for a few thousand dollars, at most? I can name a half-dozen other times where this has happened—occasionally to artists with existing relationships with the IP holder that have worked with them before (I think Ansel Hsiao is still underwater on his work appearing in Star Wars products that
he was paid for versus where it was
used without permission). Even if they're getting paid for a job, people are frequently lazy or misinformed and think that just because something is on-line that means it can be used freely. Sometimes the artist whose work is appropriated points it out and gets a credit, or compensation, or the infringing content is pulled, most of the time it doesn't go anywhere. That's life in the age of the ultra-corporation.
(I'm not sure why writers are so much more strict about potential IP infringement than visual and motion artists; perhaps the existence of strong unions and guilds which give them a vested interest in aggressive copyright enforcement, even when it might be frivolously turned against them.)
All the stuff about designs versus works and what's protected IP and what isn't is probably too esoteric for most people, if I was going to explain why what happened was wrong, I'd stick with the fraud angle; a company was contracted and paid for to produce this animated intro, and they represented work they didn't do (or pay to have done) as their own and made money from it. The idea that Paramount or their contractor can just take anything they find that's Star Trek related and sell it leads to the implication that they don't have to, perhaps even can't, pay anyone to make Star Trek content for them, which is absurd. That's the fundamental argument, that since they already own the Enterprise-shape, they don't have to compensate someone who makes something Enterprise-shaped (at their instigation or not), since they automatically fully own any subsequent derivative works.
Personally, part of the reason I followed Chris Kuhn's example and put my fan-models up with a public domain declaration is that even if I have IP rights to them, I don't want to have to care about even the possibility of enforcing them. While I'm potentially leaving money and prestige on the table by not aggressively pursuing compensation, I don't want the grief, and would rather encourage myself to experience an uncomplicated flash of delight at seeing, say, that BlueBrixx used some of my Stargate work as reference on one of their little Lego-alikes (even my
actual reaction is a brief flash of annoyance at not having been asked or informed).
