In 2003, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, a Swedish national, co-founded a website called The Pirate Bay which, over the years, gained a reputation as the largest file sharing site. website worldwide. With over 31 million users, the website has been relentlessly targeted by corporations and governments to destroy it with lawsuits and arrests – and yet, ten years later, the website remains the largest platform for file sharing on Earth (CBS p. 1). However, its founders were not as lucky as the site itself. In 2009, Warg and the site's other founders were convicted by a Swedish court of massive copyright violations, sentenced to a year in prison, and ordered to pay payments to several major entertainment companies such as Colombia Pictures and Sony Music Entertainment the equivalent of 3.6 million dollars, or 40 million crowns (CBS). In 2010, when Warg failed to show up for a court hearing, an international arrest warrant was issued for him and two years later he was arrested in Phnom Penh, the Thai capital, and immediately returned to Suede. The other co-founders had their sentences reduced, but not Warg and he is currently in prison, serving the maximum sentence (CBS p. 1). According to Alexa, a website "that tracks more than 30 million websites worldwide" with its "Alexa Rank" system, The Pirate Bay was the 73rd most visited website on the entire Internet in the fall 2013 (Alexa). Warg and The Pirate Bay are not the only example of this war that governments and corporations are waging against digital pirates – another example came with the arrest of Kim Dotcom, the founder of the infamous file-sharing site Megaupload, in 2012. over the years running the popular website Dotcom, he has...... middle of paper ......authority to obtain warrants to shut down digital pirate websites , but their authority stops within the borders of the United States (Wall Street Journal). In 2003, the RIAA developed another strategy, a massive public relations campaign that was undertaken in an attempt to create what the RIAA calls "a general sense of awareness" about piracy (Kravets p. 1). Using the DMCA to launch more than 30,000 lawsuits, with damages up to "$150,000 per piece of stolen music" and ultimately, due to the massive potential judgments, most defendants settled at amicable with the RIAA (Kravets p. 1). In 2008, the RIAA ended its extensive lawsuit campaign and turned its attention to what would later be called the "copyright alert system" and the "six strikes" policy. Excluding legal alternatives, this is the RIAA's weakest effort to try to eradicate piracy..