The default in the USA is that nobody has the right to make a copy of something created by someone else. The right to make copies is limited to the creator of the work. We say "the creator owns the copyright".

Since the legal system in the USA (and elsewhere) has "evolved" to consider copyright to be property in most of the same senses as anything else you can own, it follows that copyright can be transferred to others.

You are welcome to disagree with either premise ("no copying of someone else's creation", "right to copy is property") but that's the situation at present, and it's not obviously wrong unless you adopt some philosophical positions that the USA (and most of western Europe) does not (in aggregate) hold.