With mix DJs and found artists fighting for the right to reuse existing material, and freelance writers struggling just as hard in the opposite direction to hold on to their work in the face of a corporate rights grab, the issue of copyright and appropriation is a thorny mess. And the city’s summertime literary festival wades right into the middle, with help from New York conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith (see highlight on page 138) and Toronto’s M. Nourbese Philip, whose new book, Zong!, was inspired by old slave documents. Panels, multidisciplinary experiments, and a reading of Gwendolyn MacEwen’s A Breakfast for Barbarians in its entirety set the stage for the finale in High Park on July 14, a marathon reading in which a dozen-odd Canadian writers parade their wares. —Brent Ledger