From the linked article…
So here’s what this essentially is: fans who love TNG filling in the gaps of the original story they love with the unexplored rest of the universe of people who would have been impacted by that storyline. That’s important for two reasons. First and foremost, this doesn’t take anything away from Paramount’s Star Trek production, and in fact does the opposite. The project doesn’t replace the original episodes, but rather builds upon them. In other words, this project could only possibly serve to draw more interest to Paramount’s product, since the book isn’t going to make much sense to anyone who hasn’t seen the original episodes.
Link crossposted from https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/23/08/31/057243/paramount-dmcas-star-trek-fan-project
Yeah, they don’t do C&Ds on things that aren’t actively attempting to profit. Even something as small as a book would break the rules they put out.
I feel like nobody remembers Alec Peters and Axanar - everybody forgets the guy was selling Star Trek coffee and literally trying to bootstrap a studio with crowdfunding around the Star Trek IP. They took him to court and released this massive directive of rules and regulations on fan projects and basically nuked anything that was even taking donations.
Stuff like Stage 9 which was an Unreal Engine VR recreation of the Enterprise-D were taking Patreon donations and were also cut down by the regulations. Fun post-script to that, though - the team working on Stage 9 got hired by Fox and MacFarlane to do the same thing but for the Orville instead. It’s available on Steam as the Orville Fan Experience.
Most fanfic doesn’t cross the line because nobody is exchanging any kind of money. If these guys were printing and distributing that’s an easy violation.