Copyright

My daughter got a new set of picture books. Each book came with an audio story and a short song. You had to use a code printed inside the book to unlock them. I have made something similar for her Kids Player three times before. This was the fourth time. It was also the fastest so far. And it had one new, unexpected twist. What I Needed: A New Bookshelf, The Same Old Problems The rest of my daughter’s Kids Player already works the way I want it to: You tap a cover to hear a story. There is no autoplay. There are no algorithms. Nothing plays that she did not choose. This new set of picture books deserved the same treatment. But on the vendor’s own web page, everything was set to video by default. Some of it was okay. It was not what I wanted for everything. ...

Part three was about the tools that actually made the pictures. This part is shorter, and it’s less about code than about a decision I made along the way. The Kids Player has always been private — your family, your NAS, a password on every new device. So copyright wasn’t really the issue here? Right, and I should be clear about that up front. Because it’s a private, password-gated app for my own family, I could have reused existing footage — a frame grabbed from a video of the song — the same way I already do for the audio side of the library. Nothing about that would have been a legal problem for a personal app like this. ...