The justice department has absurd ways of determining how much damages were caused by unauthorized access. Kevin Mitnick talks about it in his book "Ghost in the Wires", but he was accused of causing $1.5mil in damages to DEC or Sun or something because he copied code, printed it out on paper, and kept it for himself (he didn't distribute it to anyone else). Fortunately, he was ultimately only ordered to pay a few thousand in restitution.