There has been a long copyright battle developing for years, and the recent events of SOPA/PIPA/ACTA have stirred up further this issue.
What is the future of scanlating and fansubbing?

back to what it used to be back in the day. random forums, irc bots and fservs, and torrents.

;D

What the last person said. Plus, even before the modern internet there was fansubs and scanlations. Who knows this bs going on with the internet may be just what the US Postal service needs as people go back to writing letters by hand and mailing each other DVD's of fansubbed anime. 😐

Sarcasm just doesn't work over the internet.

There's still a few years ahead of us. The real challenges to piracy are decent quality and innovation. Most would not bother to pirate if an official online reader was available for a series, even if it was blanketed with watermarks and annoying ads. Quite a few will even be willing to pay a subscription to access content before everyone else.

When they are able to translate the text, put them on top of text bubbles and transmit high quality images through officially supported online readers within a week of release, scanlations will fade away the way fansubs have been fading ever since Crunchyroll sold its ass out. This would be especially true if the translation can be done with the equivalent of soft subbing (the ability to turn on and off the translations). The technology is mostly already available. The only hurdles are the translations and industry inertia/stupidity.

It will still exist after that since not everyone will stream their content at the same time but the remaining series will likely be less popular ones that few marketers care about. In a way, the primary purpose of scanlations will return to its roots; to give access to series that people outside of japan would normally never have read otherwise.