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Frankly, I think DRM removal for personal purposes (which I also do, being the evil, non-law-abiding person that I am) is worse as far as copyright infringements actually harming the rights holder go, compared to writing a piece of fanfic.
A piece of non-profit fanfic is free publicity which costs the author nothing but may bring in more income (by winning the author new fans and keeping a series fresh in the minds of existing readers so that they'll remember it by the time the next instalment is out); removing DRM means that I will have a way to a) make personal backup copies of the book and b) convert them to another format if I happen to switch from my current brand of e-reader, which means that I won't be rebuying the book if the bookseller closes or I switch to another reader.
And yet it seems there are people who don't consider DRM removal for personal purposes (format shifting, backup) a big issue, while apparently a teenager writing fanfic and posting it for free on her blog is doing something really bad & wrong, especially if said teenager hasn't gone to the trouble of getting explicit permission (e.g. from the Japanese studio producing the anime the teen is writing fic for). :-/
(... and now I'm trying to imagine people writing Microsoft for permission to write fanfic about the Office Assistant paperclip, and... well, it would be funny to see the reaction, really. Or asking for permission to write fanfic about nesting functions in Excel. Although I think in the US that last one probably would be covered under the parody clause. Possibly. Unless it's serious fanfic exploring the relationships of the functions and the complications that may arise if non-canon pairings of functions happen.)
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