They don’t own the rights to it, that doesn’t mean they’re not using the same creative processes to make it. There’s not some switch artists flip to make “fake” art when they get paid.

By this metric the Sistine Chapel isn’t Real Art compared to a 15 year old typing “woman big breasts oily in a bikini on the beach” into the plagiarism machine, because Michelangelo was paid for his work and the Catholic Church came up with the idea for it.

You also seem to have a lot of misconceptions about how media is made. Boards have very little to do with it beyond making sure whatever rules they think make it most profitable are followed, and even that is mostly on project directors to enforce. They aren’t standing over people 40 hours a week, and project directors and individual artists often have a decent amount of leeway. Successful media companies’ boards keep a light touch, both because of unions and because they aren’t artists. There’s no point in hiring artists if you don’t let them work.