Try metafandom on del.icious, and the Organisation for Transformative Works - both lots of material if you go digging.
random lurker just chipping in >

You could look up Gregory Maguire. He wrote Wicked, which is basically a fanfiction of The Wizard of Oz, AND got it published. Just a thought.

She did a rather lengthly study that basically concluded that when fanfiction can be considered a transformative work, the author's distaste for it is not reason enough to suppress it. There's a lot of other issues around that so don't quote me directly, but I found it useful.

But you might want to look up the people who've banned Fanfiction of their work. Anne Rice and such. See what they're doing to try and stop it. Another interesting thing to look up would be any authors who actively encourage fanfiction etc., and how.

What I normally do for my essays is head to wikipedia, scan read, scroll to the bottom and check out the citation links, and any other links. I mean, fanfiction leads to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalissueswithfanfiction, and that has lots of interesting looking links.

Google books might be worth checking out as well.

For the proposal, do you just have to present one solution or many possible ones? Either way, try a spider diagram. Scribble down all the solutions you can think of an work off them. The only thing I would point out is that if you're siding with fan authors then you need to think of what the issue that you need to address is. Is it checking that people aren't copying your work word for word or that they're not making money off it? The first is easyish to solve (searches for text chunks), the second a little more tough. If you want a solution to how to stop fan authors altogether, then you really do need to check out Anne Rice etc.

Good luck.