I think a major problem is that it is almost impossible to stop piracy... at least by legal methods currently available. If a lot of people are doing something illegal, a lot of normal non-criminal people like you and I (which are lot of pirates often are) then it means the law is impotent. You can go after the big file sharing sites which allow it to happen but they are not necessarily the pirates - they are just the 'fence' and they may not even know it is happening (because unless they check every file uploaded to them, they can't know which ones are illegal uploads and which are not - people use these sites for genuine file sharing purposes, though the rise of dropbox has made them less critical for this).. The pirates are still out there and they simply find another place to upload, change user names, use disposable e-mail addresses and mask their IP addresses and they are effectively invisible.
Enforcement services at present do not have the money nor manpower to catch every illegal uploader never mind every illegal downloader.
My analogy is linked to dog poo... in the UK at present you can be fined up to £1000 for allowing your dog to defecate in the street without picking it up. That's a big fine (I think you get less for some drink driving offenses which to my mind are more dangerous and deserve higher penalties). However, you rarely see anyone fined so many people don't bother to pick up (not us, I have to say, we are good and pick it up...) because they do not think they will get caught.
Once, when the dog poo problem in our local park got very bad one summer, a number of local residents complained and so they did a surveillance job and caught a number of dog owners leaving the poo and fined them. They did this for a couple of days then stopped.
Things improved, there was no poo in the park. People were obeying the law because they were afraid they would get caught because some people had demonstrably been caught.
It did not last long, however. Soon everything went back to normal. Once the visible threat is removed, people revert to their old ways. They do not respect the law any more because they cannot see it in action. In order to prove someone has broken that law you need to have someone in a position to watch it happen. Either that or take samples of the poo and conduct a massive, expensive forensic investigation involving the DNA of every dog in the area...
Same applies to downloading. It is hard to catch someone at it. It is inefficient to go after the masses who just want to see the new release without paying for it, it is also hard to find the ones who are actually breaking the DRM codes and posting the books online. All you can do is hit the one immovable object in the equation - the website that hosts it. In a way this is like the US policy on terrorism. Don't go after the terrorists, just bomb the country they might possibly live in and hope you get enough of them to justify your war...
Now, when the authorities are powerless then authors can and should act to support the authorities. In my dog poo analogy, we have on occasion ran after offenders we have watched ignore poo and offered them a poo bag because 'clearly they have forgotten theirs'. In many cases this shames them into doing the right thing.
Not saying a public name and shame is in order but certainly report any information to the authorities...
But I think I also know how the research will come out. It is easy to be idealistic when you do not have money riding on something...
