@Wildduck @ZachWeinersmith Fanfic is still under copyright of the author, because it's their creative content in a recorded form and it's a "transformative work". They just down own the characters and so are limited in how they can publish that work.

That's why there's the OTW (https://www.transformativeworks.org/) to protect fan works. Just because they don't own the characters, it doesn't mean that other people (or even the characters' owners) can ignore copyright.