Author: mattshepherd

I love storytelling, and helping organizations share their truth with the world. From non-profit media outlets to for-profit boutique agencies to one of Canada's great universities, I've been connecting institutions and stakeholders for a while, and enjoying both the journey and seeing great ideas find great audiences.

Categories
Marketing & Communications

Puffery drift

I continue to be fascinated — maybe uniquely so? — by puffery. Probably because of the marketing background, but the notion that being untruthful is okay if the lie is extravagant enough that a layperson wouldn’t believe it 1my own words; I’m working on a set of definitions in case law, which will be interesting (to me, anyway). is not only intriguing, but I’d argue in some ways necessary to modern advertising.

At the far end, it makes perfect sense. If you watch an ad for Skittles and a unicorn touches a couch with its horn and the couch turns to Skittles, it would be preposterous for somebody to sue the Skittles people if a furniture-transforming unicorn fails to appear when they open a pack.

But at the other end of the spectrum, there’s a line past which the grey starts shading into black, and judges are making very nuanced decisions based on, I’d argue, very little guidance. Looking at CanLII, the word ‘puffery’ has been used a lot in court decisions in the last few years, with subtypes of puffery including…

  • “election puffery,” examined repeatedly by the Nova Scotia Labour Board (there seem to be a lot of union disputes in the Maritimes these days)
  • Criminal court, where puffery has been raised as a form of braggadocio under which somebody claiming to have committed acts of violence was clearly using puffery to enhance their rep, but not seriously confessing to crimes
  • Privacy statements, even granular ones such as “[COMPANY] complies with all applicable privacy laws, rules, and regulations in the jurisdictions within which it operates”.

Nothing substantial here today, but a bit of a placeholder to remind myself that I’d like to unpack this a bit more.

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    my own words; I’m working on a set of definitions in case law, which will be interesting (to me, anyway).
Categories
Creative Just for fun Nerd

2025 calendar template for Affinity Publisher 2

Just in case anyone needs one: I made a tabloid size, portrait-oriented calendar template for Affinity Publisher 2 for 2025.

Working on some holiday gifts for friends and family, and thought I’d share the file.

Download the calendar template

Categories
Copyright Law

CanLII and Caseway: claim on TOS grounds

I used an AI generator to create an image of "a very rich man did something foolish," which feels appropriate to the situation here.
I used an AI generator to create an image of "a very rich man did something foolish," which feels appropriate to the situation here.

As reported by Law360, CanLII is filing suit against the Caseway AI chatbot over allegations of a mass scrape of CanLII’s content.

I’m a big CanLII fan. I use it all the time, including on multiple blog posts on this site, and recorded a podcast episode about it some time ago. It’s a phenomenal resource.

There are a few things that will be unpacked here, in the courts or otherwise.

CanLII’s main claim to fame isn’t original content, but being a central resource that consolidates legal decisions in Canada.

That said, the very first point in the Statement of Facts, per CanLII, is

  • The plaintiff, the Canadian Legal Information Institute (“CanLII”), is a not-for-profit organization that owns and operates a proprietary search engine and database containing its work product, including court decisions, legislation and secondary sources that have been reviewed, curated, catalogued and enhanced by CanLII at significant cost and effort (the “CanLII Works”).

This would be tricky to defend on copyright grounds. The Supreme Court has upheld copyright in “headnotes, case summary, topical index and compilation of reported judicial decisions” in the past.1CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada, [2004] 1 S.C.R. 339, 2004 SCC 13 Broadly speaking, most of what CanLII does isn’t original work.

But some of it is! From the Statement of Facts, 18(i) CanLII:

summariz[es] court decisions and generating an original analysis containing case facts, procedural history, parties’ submissions, legal issues, disposition, and reasons for judgment, with links to the pertinent paragraph numbers within the body of the corresponding decision;

This clearly aligns with the SCC decision above, and if it’s found that Clearway included and used the original works in their scrapes, that’s not great for them.

What’s really interesting is that CanLII is approaching this as a breach of contract, via the Terms of Use for the website. It feels, to my eyes, like they know the copyright case is inherently a bit shaky, and the clearer path is to reinforce the copyright infringement claim with the breach of contract.

This distinguishes CanLII from other high-profile lawsuits against AI by creators claiming copyright violation. Sarah Silverman, for instance, doesn’t have terms of use. (I’m sure Sarah Silverman could make a great and filthy joke about her “terms of use,” but I digress.)

The TOS tack is novel, to my knowledge.

Caseway’s counter-arguments to CanLII’s claims are, well, kinda stupid. Per the Law360 article:

“Our AI is built to pull and analyze unaltered court documents directly from public sources, ensuring compliance with copyright and intellectual property laws. CanLII’s attempt to restrict us from using their data is essentially moot, as we’re already avoiding it,” [Alistair Vigier, co-founder of Caseway AI] said in a statement.

But… Caseway did. Whether or not the documents are publicly accessible doesn’t alter the fact that they pulled them from CanLII.

And

He added that he had never seen or accepted CanLII’s terms of service and noted that Caseway does not incorporate CanLII’s works in any way that masks, frames, or misrepresents their origin.

Yeah, nobody ever reads those things, huh? That doesn’t mean they don’t exist (digging in the crates again, I did a fun podcast episode several years ago with Peter Kissick about the contracts nobody reads). But they’re there. Ignore them at your peril.

Vigier noted that an injunction restricting Caseway from using CanLII’s data would not impact its operations as it is not using any CanLII data in its system.

Whether or not they’re presently using the data is again immaterial to whether or not they violated the TOS and copyright of CanLII.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out. Hopefully not an out of court settlement; there are some nuances around the value of categorization and analysis that seem to fall under the SCC threshold established in CCH that could be interesting to see threshed out in court.

And the recursive loop of looking all this up in CanLII will be fun.

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    CCH Canadian Ltd. v. Law Society of Upper Canada, [2004] 1 S.C.R. 339, 2004 SCC 13
Categories
Just for fun

Horror Movie Challenge 2024

After a few years of playing along with a horror podcast’s horror-movie-every-day October horror challenge, we’ve homebrewed one for 2024, along with my sister-in -law and horror-fiend niece.

The idea is that there’s a theme per day, but we don’t tell people what to watch — they fill in the blanks based on their interpretation of the sometimes-quite-loose, sometimes-very-directive themes.

2024’s list:

Horror Challenge October 2024


01 Final Girl(s) – Happy Death Day

02 Into the Wilderness – The Watchers

03 Food Fight – The Stuff

04 Costumed Creeps – The Banana Splits Movie

05 Animals – Night of the Lepus

06 Clown Town – Killer Klowns from Outer Space

07 Dolls, Living or Otherwise – Oddity

08 This Actor Is Too Good For This Movie – Tentacles

09 Fancy Draculas – Salem’s Lot

10 Scary Books – A Dark Song

11 Silent Movie – Haxan

12 The Sequel – Nightmare on Elm St. 2: Freddy’s Revenge

13 Giant Monster – Tremors

14 Religious Horror – Tumbbad

15 A Scarrel of Laughs – Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

16 “It’s a trap!” – Trap

17 Art-House Horror – Eyes Without a Face / Company of Wolves

18 Meh Movie, Great Soundtrack – The Keep

19 Space: the Scary Frontier – V/H/S Beyond

20 Queer Horror – Jennifer’s Body

21 J-Horror (or K-Horror) – One Cut of the Dead

22 The Monster Is The Protagonist – Black Out

23 ’80s Kids – The Watcher in the Woods

24 Evil Children – Z (2019)

25 Under de Sea – Lake of Death

26 The Threequel – Nightmare on Elm St. 3 – The Dream Warriors

27 Beep beep! Cars/trucks/campers – Maximum Overdrive (or Titane)

28 The Only Way to Win (Video Games) – Brainscan (or Stay Alive)

29 Sports Horror – 5150, rue des ormes

30 Before They Were Famous

31 The Scariest Film I Know

Categories
Kingston, Ontario Life in general

100+ Kingston Independent Restaurants With Websites

This took a long time to do! And I suspect will take a bit of effort to maintain over time.

The biggest issue being to create the table with icons, it wound up being necessary to pull the table out as HTML, manually insert the Font-Awesome icon codes, and then update the table manually every time I wanted to add a line with the icons.

Compounded by the fact that I’m an idiot, and thought that doing a find-and-replace at the code level for “Street,” St.,” etc. to “St,” and “Road,” “Rd.”, etc. as “Rd” was a good idea. But I had RegEx turned on, so when I replaced “St.” and Rd.” every string with St* and with Rd* was replaced, including the word “Kingston,” strings like “Bistro,” and so on — including their URLs. But by the time I noticed it was too late to undo. So half my time on the table was spent fixing those mistakes.

Ultimately, I’d prefer to live in a world where chain restaurants are rare, Facebook is extinct, and people curate local information without being reliant on algorithm driven search. I use Google Sheets and Google MyMaps for this, so I’m not angling to make this some sort of weird purity test — but I’m hoping to use those tools to make people less reliant on Google’s primary product, and do a small bit to eradicate Facebook/Meta.

Categories
Just for fun Life in general

The Time I Did Not Steal A Van Gogh (which I now kind of regret)

"Wheat Field with Cypresses" by Vincent Van Gogh.
"Wheat Field with Cypresses" by Vincent Van Gogh. This was probably not the painting in question, but is kind of typical of the paintings that were in this exhibition -- known paintings, but not Top Five like Starry Night, Sunflowers or What The Hell Happened To My Ear.

So Back in the Day I lived in Sherbrooke, Quebec, which has a better-than-you’d-expect art gallery, the Musée de Beaux-Arts de Sherbrooke. A converted really huge three-story mansion.

There was a touring exhibit of impressionist painters that was hitting all the big Canadian galleries that year. You got your Monets, you got your Van Goghs, like one or two lesser paintings from a bunch of the big names. And for some reason, it gets a week at MBAS as well as all the bigger-city galleries. This didn’t get a ton of fanfare: an article in the local French papers and in the sole local English paper.

This is partly because MBAS building would be really big for a house, but it was pretty small for a gallery. I don’t think they had a budget for marketing or promotion at all. The total staff count in there at any point would usually be two people: somebody at the front desk / coat check who would also dash over if somebody was in the tiny gift shop, and a wandering security person.

So this travelling exhibition is up on the third floor of MBAS, and as a frequent visitor, I know a few things:

  • You just walk into the gallery. It costs I think $5 as a suggested donation. Nobody checks your ID or anything.
  • The fire escape, which you can access through a normal screen door leading to a small balcony from the always-open third-floor break room, is a set of stairs running right down to beside the gallery. It is always unlocked and unalarmed. I’ve seen enough people ducking out there for a smoke over time that I’m aware of that.
  • There’s one security person; on the day I drop by to see the Impressionists, it’s a women in I’d guess her 70s. They walk every floor, very slowly, so once they leave the third floor to walk downstairs and start over at the first, you’ve got probably a 20-minute window before they get back to the third floor.

Faced with the Impressionists, I also realize:

  • They’ve just, like, hung the paintings. Like you or I would. They don’t seem to be super affixed to the walls with some sort of weird backing systems, they aren’t locked or behind glass. They’re just there, wire on a nail style.
  • There are, at least to my ability to see them, no security cameras or anything. I’d never really cared to look before, but I’m suddenly motivated by the realization that
  • I can totally steal a fucking Van Gogh.

Spoiler: I didn’t. But man, I thought real hard about it. Not to keep, but just, you know, take it down, wander down the fire escape, loop the block and drop it back off. Or take it home for the night and drop it off in the morning.

Do I regret not stealing a Van Gogh? Hell yeah. I wish to this day I’d nutted up and temporarily stolen a Van Gogh. Maybe I was missing something and an alarm would have gone off and I would have been charged with attempted theft of a Van Gogh, but if you’re gonna crime, what a crime to crime.

And maybe I wasn’t missing something! Maybe I could have 100% stolen a Van Gogh. And for the rest of my life been dining out on The Time I Stole the Van Gogh.

But I didn’t. So instead all I have is The Time I Could Have Stolen A Van Gogh And Didn’t. Which is what you’re getting here.

Sorry.

Categories
Just for fun Nerd

I spent an hour on this dumb D&D joke so by God you’re going to see it

mashup of a mind flayer (illithid) and the Beastie Boys' Ill Communication album cover. Copyright the original creators. This is very silly.

For those of you not deeply steeped in arch geekery, an Illithid is a species in Dungeons and Dragons, colloquially known as a “Mind Flayer.”

They are basically squid-headed jerks that eat brains.

As the long-running campaign I’m part of (12th level Warlock/Paladin, thanks for asking) winds toward a summer break and we get into the final approach for a seasonal Big Bad, our GM asked what Illithid-themed flair would work for us, so I set about creating this monstrosity.

Categories
Life in general Nerd

Welcome to Pontypool

Pontypool town sign with "TEAR THEM APART" handmade sign

The sporadically-updating horror podcast Tear Them Apart did an episode on one of the great sleeper horror movies of all time, Pontypool, last month.

Horror fans that don’t know much about south-eastern Ontario likely don’t know that Pontypool is a real place — in fact, I went to high school one town over, and spent a fair bit of time in Caesarea and Nestleton with friends, a short hop away.

Caesarea is even name-checked in the movie, and is the title of the third of a three-book trilogy by the author of the novel that Pontypool the movie was adapted from.

Visiting my folks last weekend, I thought I’d swing by the town to take some pictures for Evan Dorkin and Paul M Yellovich, the podcast’s hosts.

The Pontypool sign, with a quick best-efforts “Tear Them Apart” podcast call-out. I took it down after. I was really angering all the goats in the weird-ass half-farm next to the sign so I had to make it quick.

“Downtown” Pontypool, facing north. Note the telephone pole “TAKE BACK CANADA” sign. People think Ontario / Canada is pretty progressive, but it’s more like New York State: once you’re out of the cities, you’ll find a lot of the same regressive racist yahoos you find in any rural place. This was the part of the drive to my folks’ place where farms have STAY OFF MY LAND GUBBERMINT signs, and vaccine conspiracy lawn signs sprouted like weeds during COVID.

Grant Mazzy would probably be more at home here as a shock jock than the station staff would like to believe.

Same position, turning south:

That’s it. That’s Pontypool. The streets stretch out about a kilometre in all directions with mostly two-story houses of a mid-19th-century vintage.

The sign on the left of this photo is for the town’s only gas station (with integrated Tim Horton’s naturally; there’s nothing more faux Canadian than this foreign-owned chain that’s somehow convinced people it’s a Canadian icon, and that its coffee doesn’t taste like battery acid that briefly had a coffee bean dipped in it).

Tim Horton’s has grown in my mind in recent years to really represent the rise of the right in Canada: symbols are more important than reality, and being “Canadian” is more important than being Canadian. It’s not a Canadian chain any more, and the coffee and food are terrible, but it’s “Canadian,” so Doug Ford shills for Smile cookies and — okay, I’m getting off-topic. Tim Hortons sucks.

Behind the grocery store across the street you can see a little red sign; that’s the pharmacy on the first floor of a house. Facing the pharmacy, the only grocery/convenience store, and the only restaurant:

That’s it. That’s Pontypool. The streets stretch out about a kilometre in all directions with mostly two-story houses of a mid-20th-century vintage.

Not pictured is the town arena, which if you live in Ontario and I say “small town arena,” you’re already picturing.

The most unrealistic thing about Pontypool (the movie) is that it has a radio station that employs at least three people full-time. The most realistic thing about Pontypool (the movie) is the syndicated news break at the beginning that mentions a major drug bust in Caesarea. That 100% checks out.

The above probably sounds like I’m dunking on Pontypool; I kind of am, because I’m a bit triggered by the TAKE BACK CANADA garbage and have less than fond memories of COVID-area rural lunacy.

I grew up in a town about this size, and I’m sure it’s as much a mixed bag as that town was.

Anyway, that’s Pontypool-the-town, if anyone is watching the movie (it’s really, really good!) and wants to see what the real-deal place looks like.

Categories
Chess Chess Institute of Canada Enrichment Executive Director

Onward and chessward!

Cartoon of Matt Shepherd looking at a chess board.
Chess photo by Vlada Karpovich: https://www.pexels.com/photo/chess-pieces-on-the-chess-board-6114952/

Catching my breath after my first week in my new role as Executive Director of the Chess Institute of Canada; onboarding in Toronto while meeting the Board, the staff and many of the instructors.

I’m really excited to be joining CIC at a pivotal moment in their history. “Chess for life” is their mission: imparting valuable and lasting life skills through the medium of the world’s greatest game. There’s so much you can learn from the “gymnasium of the mind” — strategy, forethought, patience and planning, yes; also good sportspersonship, how to deal with adversity, creative problem-solving and perseverance through setbacks.

Student enrichment was dramatically altered over COVID, and while this is an organization built on excellence from a firm footing based on the vision of its founder, Ted Winick, in many ways this is also a new era for CIC in terms of how it instructs, where it reaches, and who it benefits. Chess is for everyone, and I’m incredibly excited to be working with a dedicated, passionate and innovative team in making sure everyone can benefit from what it brings.

I’m still drinking from the fire hose, as they say — lots to learn, lots to do — but honoured and thrilled to be entrusted to lead this organization from greatness to… even more greatness. Super greatness.

I’m sure I’ll have many incredibly apt chess metaphors at the tip of my tongue very soon, but for now, I’m just very happy to be here, and especially to be working with a visionary and committed board, incredibly dedicated and passionate staff, and immensely talented and compassionate instructors.

Background photo by Vlada Karpovich: https://www.pexels.com/photo/chess-pieces-on-the-chess-board-6114952/

Categories
Just for fun Life in general

Big Changes; Swift Action

Lots going on in my life these days; most folks who know me know this, but my last day at Smith Engineering was February 9, 2024. This also represents a step away from higher education marketing career-wise; big news coming, but not until March.

“Coming down” from a job you’ve put a lot of your brain and identity into for years is a process. I was fortunate to be asked by friends of friends to house-sit / dog-sit for this very good, very silly boy for a week:

…which gave me a week of decompressing, partly getting ready for the Next Thing, lots of dog-walking, etc.

I’ve never really listened to Taylor Swift, but both of my nieces are bananas for her. Big Swifties. And there’s nothing wrong with that! I just run my own music server / support soma.fm, so my listening doesn’t generally include stuff I don’t intend it to. And while I’m trying to be less snobbish than I used to be, the culture around Swift wasn’t one where I felt compelled to seek it out and listen to her music.

But — time on my hands, and looking to reset my brain in some significant ways — I challenged my nieces that if they would make me playlists of up to 15 songs, I would give them an earnest listen.

And they did (their mom said it was “the hardest she’d ever seen them work on something like homework”). So I did!

I’m a big fan of my reMarkable, so I used it to write while I gave these songs a Whole Listen. I have no idea why anyone would be interested in these, but my wife suggested I post them for posterity, so if you’re looking for a 50-year-old man’s perspective on lists of Taylor Swift songs compiled by two teens, here y’go:

Taylor Swift – Set 1 (Bella)Download
Taylor Swift – Set 2 (Maddy)Download

I can’t say I’d be lining up for tickets (especially at these prices), but I have to say I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. And that it’s a lot more maudlin than I expected! I was thinking it was all pop bangers — “Look What You Made Me Do” is the only Taylor Swift song I can summon to memory — but there’s a whole subcategory of Swift songs I now call the “piano sads”.

Really impressed with the songwriting, the lyrics. Would be more enthused if she seemed to have any way of positioning herself and her life other than the present state of whatever relationship she’s in (but maybe, again, this is just a reflection of where my nieces are at in their song choices).

I’ve also been thinking a bit about why I’ve been so out of the Swift orbit; the fair question for myself, I think, is to ask why I’ve been quasi-avoiding this very popular, very successful female singer/songwriter, and would I duck out on male pop stars the same way?

And… having given it some thought, I feel okay. I can think of a number of Very Big acts that I’ve also never really made time for, across a number of spectrums, so I don’t think there’s anything there. But it’s good to ask yourself periodically where the “I’m not interested in what this person has to say” instinct comes from. In this case I think it’s just the form, and if I’m honest a bit of New Country stink in the background, that drove the disinterest.

On the whole, a really worthwhile exercise. I feel like I have a better understanding of a big piece of the zeitgeist right now.