“It’s time to…declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture,” wrote computer programmer and internet activist Aaron Swartz in his “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” (2008). Swartz was criticizing the privatization of scholarship already in the public domain, and seeking ways to make this work accessible to everyone. This essay examines Swartz’s open access vision, and traces the challenges he faced in carrying out his dream. I trace how digital technologies have shifted the boundaries of the scholarly community and outline how we can return scholarship past and present to the public domain.