The internet is a treasure chest of infringing or "pirated" entertainment media, which viewers from around the world access, copy, and share with relative ease. Data and qualitative reviews suggest infringement is ubiquitous in the streaming and downloading domain. The current approach to copyright enforcement places undue burdens on copyright owners who cannot economically advance claims against millions of individual users. Poorly constructed copyright laws and misguided Court decisions have left rights‐holders with too few remedies against commercial entities involved in the storage, retrieval, transmission, access, and streaming of their works. A five‐year exploratory and observational study were conducted to discover facts about online pirate media, how services function, how companies make money, and how they skirt around laws prohibiting unauthorized commercial exploitation of copyright. [---]