@Md-Martin:
What ABOUT it?
It surely did help the western audience for anime and manga grow without a doubt.
But this isn't 2005 anymore.
Crunchyroll and other streaming services have virtually whiped away English fansubs. The worst part of Piracy in the english speaking anime community right now are sites that simply reupload things -like One Piece's free simulcast" onto their own sites. Not many are bothering to go sub shows with official subbed streams, given the time and effort to do it.
Manga is a bit trickier. But the main issue at hand is simply that scanlations are posted before the Japanese core audience even gets it. I don't think anyone on this forum has a problem with people scanlating a series in a country that doesn't have an up to date, official translation. It's just that as a fandom across multiple manga, we've become used to getting something half a week earlier than the official, and some simply don't want to wait if the official is not accessible.
Speaking as someone that wants to be an artist and that can become a target of piracy (hopefully), I do think it's simple minded to vilify piracy without also considering (a) how it has benefited the market, (b) how it still benefits consumers and how it has lead to good innovation in business models for music, films and series/animes. Not to mention even more complicated stuff that I won't mention further such as (d) the principles of copyright law and its historical roots, (e) the distribution of products before and after the internet and its costs, and (f) the complexity of what is justice.
Going back to "a", "b" and "c"... you mention that it's not 2005 anymore because now we have Crunchyroll (and Netflix and Spotify and all these streaming services), but this kind of business innovation happened thanks to the fact that piracy made the previous business model obsolete… because it's hard to imagine that big artists and big companies (that actually own the artists) would be authorizing apps to stream their music/films instead of selling CDs and DVDs, since people would still be buying CDs and DVDs if piracy didn't exist. Now we have WSJ releasing their stuff for free and making their entire backlog available for $2... and that's GREAT!
Eventually it could happen even if piracy had never existed, maybe, but probably not so soon or not so succesfully or not so consumer friendly.
Then there is the fact, as previously mentioned, that piracy has lead to the anime boom in the west. Now that the industry has an established market worldwide to profit gazillions of dollars (benefiting the market), is it time to burn the pirates? I guess so, or maybe they still have a role to play.
You see, one thing that we have learned in the last 10 years is that most people are actually willing to support their favorite artists/companies if they have the money and the price is fair to them. What piracy does is to help the consumer to make an informed decision, because they get to know a wide range of stuff (even stuff that they wouldn't try out otherwise) before deciding what they like and what they want to buy with the money they have… and so every product hopefully can find its particular audience that will support it. That's pretty awesome, because without piracy certain artists just don't find their audience.
Now that WSJ is free in many countries, that's a huge improvement towards making people go to the official source, and I bet that a lot of people are doing it. However, I wouldn't crucify the people that still want to check out the scans for whatever reason.