Just what I was wondering. How could anyone claim this isn't copyright violation and be voted up? You'd have to be completely ignorant of copyright to defend this person.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Characters are copyrightable, and you don't even have to use the exact character to infringe. Just look at Neil Gaiman's copyright case against Todd McFarlane for a recent example. As far as I know, there have been no broad testing cases for fanfiction, but if there were, any defense would rest upon Fair Use; the fanfiction is clearly in violation of copyright, it would be up to the defendant to prove that 1) they had no profit interest, and 2) they were doing no harm to the IP of the original creator. Even then, they might not be successful in arguing on that vein. The non-profit clause is actually meant to protect non-profits.

Plain text and PDF are both inadequate, for what should be obvious reasons. Plain text does not allow formatting, font selection, or images. PDF was originally intended for printing, which means that PDF documents are built to display in a very specific pre-formatted way. Ebook readers can come in all sizes and shapes, and have to be able to adapt the display of the content to fit the context. That said, there are already formats out there that seem to fulfill all or most of the requirements for ebooks. I'm not really sure why the want a new format rather than adding to one that already exists.

to create some new category regarding information? It seems like everyone has a hard time deciding how things like data fit into existing copyright law, so why not sidestep copyright altogether and create new laws which are more applicable to private and public data stored on the internet?