Defending Some Common Misconceptions of Fan Fiction

I was idly surfing the web today and I came across this article about fan fiction and the legal issues that come from it. Here's the link to the article if you're interested http://www.whoosh.org/issue62/ecks2.html. It's kind of long; fair warning. The article is divided into different sections and in this blog, I'm talking about the section titled 'Fan Fiction Based on Novels'

For a little background, fan fiction has gained a lot of popularity in the last few years, so that of course leads to more media attention. The most commonly talked about issue that comes from fan fiction is the potential copyright infringement. This article cited various authors talking about their dislike of fan fiction.

Here's one from an author named Lawrence Watt-Evans:
"And the other thing, which might seem contradictory, is that written fanfic is too close to the original -- it's the same medium. It seems to be stealing some of the original author's market -- and given how little money most novelists make to begin with, that bothers me." (Watt-Evans)

I don't mean any disrespect to Mr. Watt-Evans, but I'd really like to know where he got that idea. Fan fiction is not taking away from the original writer's money. Legally, we can't publish our work even if we wanted to. All characters, etc. out there are protected under copyright, so if someone was trying to publish their fan fictions claiming that the characters are their own, they'd be slapped with a lawsuit. The majority of fan fiction have disclaimers saying that the characters and universes we're writing about don't belong to us to stop that very event from occurring. Granted I don't know how well that would hold up in court, but the proof that none of us are making or attempting to make money off of the stories we write is there plain as day. If anyone ever did try to sell a book using someone else's characters, I would completely agree with Mr. Watt-Evans and all the other authors that share his opinion about fan fiction. That's completely and totally not cool, but as it stands, none of us fan fiction writers are making any money off of our stories.