The thing is, no one sets out to pirate. They just want a good quality product. If there's a legal option and an illegal option and they're equivalent, anyone will pick the legal one unless they're being deliberately contrary. Music piracy went way down when iTunes was created, simply because for the first time there
was a legal option as convenient as the illegal one.
Most anti-piracy measures take the wrong approach, and add things to their products which make them worse (DRM which stops you from playing a game, unskippable messages at the start of a video). Piracy can never be stamped out entirely, and since pirates will obviously remove your annoying anti-piracy measures you're just making your product less attractive compared to piracy.
So, what's to be done? How do you actually protect intellectual property in this modern age of technology?
Is the answer to just throw up our hands and say "fuck it"; do we decide that intellectual property isn't? Well, that's bullshit, on its face. So, again, what's to be done?
If SOPA/PIPA are wrong, then be productive and propose an alternative solution.
Intellectual property =/= buying something in a shop. You can give something away for free and maintain your intellectual property. That's the business model of webcomics, and you can easily make a living off it. There are music artists doing this too. Heck, the OGL is a close-to-home example of this being more profitable than the traditional model.
You don't even have to go that far though - even something as simple as including a poster with your DVD makes it something which people will want to buy, even if they pirated it already. Merchandise and live appearances are the way forward.
A case example:
Most of the anime/manga fan-translation community works on an honour basis. If a work is only available in Japan that's one thing, but the second an official translation is announced then every group will stop their own translations completely and encourage everyone to buy it. And there's a huge gap here - while an official translation might take years and end up heavily censored/badly dubbed/incomplete, a fan translation can come out in
hours.
An unofficial translation competing with an official one would harm sales. However, an unofficial translation which predates an official one
improves sales, by increasing awareness. In fact, the companies who license properties for official translation check fan-translations to see what's popular.
Haruhi Suzumiya was viewed as "too Japanese" until they realised how popular it was, and it's since made the licensers millions. Some titles really are just so niche that translating them would be unprofitable, but unofficial distributions mean free advertising and merchandise being bought by foreign fans.
J-Comi is handling this right - why try to stop the translators when you can make them work for you? Any company would kill for this - hypercompetent 100%-devoted workers who come in huge numbers and don't have to be payed.
