The law has tried to keep pace with the technological changes since then. This has resulted in the laws being reflective of the economic impact of networks and computing, rather than of the social impact of the various crimes and the punishments are accordingly severe. The real problem is how to make sure that actual crime can be punished hard enough that the punishments serve as a deterrent while at the same time allowing for activism and other reasonably benign (or even positive) transgressions of those same laws without allowing prosecutors to nail those same activists to a tree as an example using laws intended for the former group.

This is a hard problem to solve.

Woz, Gates, Jobs (and me too...) all profited from being born when this stuff was not as much on the political and social radar as it is today.