Knowledge is power, the saying goes, though if you look at how the world actually works, ignorant rich people have a lot more power than knowledgeable poor ones. A more precise formulation might be that marketable knowledge is power, which is why your friend in the financial services industry rolls his eyes whenever you hold forth on the subject of French medieval poetry. Two documentaries opening this week, Ivory Tower and The Internet’s Own Boy, touch on the subject of monetizing knowledge, and you’re liable to find each infuriating in its own way if you see the U.S. as a country rapidly devolving into a two-tiered society.
For someone who cleared a million bucks on his own creative work before he was old enough to vote, Swartz was pretty cavalier about offering up other people’s creative work for free. But The Internet’s Own Boy isn’t the sort of movie that trades in moral complexity. For director Brian Knappenberger and everyone he interviews, Swartz was a martyr pure and simple, the victim of an overzealous U.S. attorney named Stephen Heymann who took advantage of an outmoded piece of legislation (the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) to construct a crime where none had occurred (as a Harvard fellow, Swartz was entitled to download articles from JSTOR free of charge, and he never got a chance to upload them before he was busted). They’re wrong when they argue that no one is hurt by such guerrilla operations—scholarship is expensive to produce, and destroying its market value isn’t likely to increase production—but Swartz was right in believing there must be a more equitable arrangement for everyone.
Correction: This review has been amended to correctly reflect JSTOR’s not-for-profit business model.
Ivory Tower ★★ Directed by Andrew Rossi 90 min. Landmark’s Century Centre
