Ross W. Ulbricht, founder of the website Silk Road, where users could buy and sell drugs online, has been sentenced to life in prison by a federal court, according to the New York Times. He was also ordered to forfeit $184 million. While the charges arrayed against Ulbricht, which included engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise and distributing narcotics on the Internet, had a minimum 20 year sentence, the judge felt a life sentence was appropriate, saying that his website was "terribly destructive to the social fabric," according to the New York Times. In the three years the site operated, it had facilitated over one and a half million transactions between more than 100,000 accounts, said the Times. The judge hoped to use Ulbricht as an example for anyone else pondering creating and running a similar website in the future (since his arrest, a number of copycat websites have opened to fill the void left in the wake of Silk Road's shutdown). Ulbricht, while saying he didn't want to justify what he did, said that the intention of Silk Road was to empower people to make their own choices and have privacy and anonymity, and that he's not a bad person, just someone who made some serious mistakes. The judge was unmoved, saying that while he does not fit the typical criminal profile, he can't just go out and run a massive criminal enterprise as if you're above the law.