SXSW hosted an open town hall forum to honor the life and work of Aaron Swartz, the open access activist and brilliant computer hacker and programmer who took his life in January.

The panel included many people who knew and worked with Swartz, including Taren Stinebricker-Kauffman, who was Swartz’s partner for the last year and a half of his life. The panel also included Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, Timothy Wu, a Columbia law professor, Jennifer Lynch from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Gary DeGregorio, who had been working with Swartz for the last year to develop Victory Kit, an open source technology designed to help novice political campaigner, as well as others who had been close to Swartz.

Aside from remembering and honoring the life of Aaron Swartz, the town hall style panel called for change to a legal and political system that not only failed Swartz but has also failed us all.

The primary complaint was that the punishment should fit the crime.

In Swartz’s case he faced a potential sentence of 35 years in prison and over a million dollars in fines, for allegedly stealing articles from JSTOR, an online database of academic journals, something that caused little to no economic or physical harm to anybody.

The panel rallied audience members to lobby for changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). A handful of changes, named “Aaron’s Law” have also been introduced to Congress as a means of trying to reform existing laws so that the punishments are reasonably matched to the crimes.

Timothy Wu, a Columbia law professor who also wrote a piece about Swartz for the New York Times, made the case that the severe punishments that are doled out according to the CFAA and US copyright laws are something that need to be changed. Not only do these punishments far outweigh the severity of the crimes, but also stand in the way of technological advancement.

Some of the people who brought us the technology we have now did things that were far worse that Swartz’s alleged offense and if they had been imprisoned for 35+ years who knows how that could have delayed technological advancement.

If Steve Jobs had been prosecuted for the computer crimes he committed in his younger years, where would we have gotten iPhones?

The fallout over Aaron Swartz’s legal battle and subsequent suicide has left the technology and computer world angry and distrustful of the government and their treatment of hackers. This is not exactly desirable considering we are on the brink of a Cyber Cold War, where a country’s strength is going to be measured by the sophistication of its technology.

The need to set a precedent for how to handle computer crimes is important to help protect people against cyber threats. That being said, the late Aaron Swartz was definitely not a threat that we needed to be protected from.