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On the one hand, I'm a web-wanderer. I've had years to think about information, technology, and information technology, and I've come to the conclusion that
Information should be free, dammit!
The only protected information should be private information. Once an idea has been invented, it should be let out into the world to interact with other ideas and spawn more cool inventions and stories.
On the other hand, I'm a writer. Not a professional, but I'm working on that. Unfortunately, the market has no bottom, and you have to get *damn* good (not to mention lucky) just to make a decent living at it.
See, that's the problem: Who has time to get good enough to make it a specialty? We have to pay creative people somehow, or else they'll be too busy trying to put beans on the table to concentrate on or share any neat ideas.
That's what patents and copyrights should be about.
So the question becomes, Does fanfic damage anyone's income? As long as we're talking about movie or tv fandom, the answer is quite the contrary.
Fanfic *helps*.
Fanfic widens audiences
It draws in new people. It keeps a story fresh so that longtime fans keep coming back for more. It provides an outlet for everything that doesn't fit in the traditional, one-genre / one-format tv approach to storytelling.
There's a lot I could say about communities and archetypes and storytelling and feminist subversion of masculinist entertainment, but I don't want to belabor the point and/or bore you.
Suffice it to say that, though I would probably write these stories anyway, I certainly wouldn't take them out of my little notebook and put them here for other people to enjoy if I thought someone was losing a chance at remuneration for their efforts because of stories by fans.