I see a potential way around this problem (and Lord, I hope I'm not opening another legal can of worms here). But it seems to me that fanfic writers and readers could go off-line in their pursuits--literally, taking their work off the Internet and transposing it onto good old-fashioned paper with good old-fashioned ink. The resulting work could be shared, without monetary profit, via mail or through actual physical meetings. A kind of fanfic samizdat culture, if you will, could result. As long as nothing is actually being published commercially, and no one is making any money off of it, I don't see how it would me much of a problem to the copyright holders (or even, for that matter, how they would even come to know of it).