In another life, and in other worlds, Northwestern University philosophy professor Peter Ludlow—aka Urizenus Sklar—was a fearless journalist, reporting on crime and official corruption and letting the chips fall where they may.
He was also an eccentric: an elfin, shy, hypersensitive, secretive, and unpredictable high school and college dropout, famous among friends (who might not know that he suffered from ulcerative colitis) for subsisting largely on a diet of macaroni and cheese and grilled cheese sandwiches.
Swartz “did something illegal,” he said on the phone last week, “as did Rosa Parks when she sat in the front of the bus, and as did Gandhi when he went to the ocean to make salt.
And copyrights held by the publishers? Void them, he argues. “Pool resources, get some lawyers, and go after them. They are what I would call a contract of adhesion. Which is a contract between parties of unequal bargaining power.
“To put it bluntly,” he writes, “the current state of academic publishing is the result of a series of strong-arm tactics enabling publishers to pry copyrights from authors, and then charge exorbitant fees to university libraries for access to that work. The publishers have inverted their role as disseminators of knowledge and become bottlers of knowledge.”
