I've always been curious about something along the same lines. I did this, though I did give credit to the original author in my own code. I looked at a snippet to add mail support to a MUD - the ability to send mail to players. I didn't copy the code via cut and paste or line by line. I based my code off of what I had read. Parts look nearly identical, but that's because there's no other easy way to do it.
Thus... if I hadn't felt like being respectful, would I have been breaking any copyrights? Say they didn't want it redistributed, and I didn't add any mention of them in my code. Rather I wrote it based on the usage I saw in their code... where would this fall?
Or how about ideas? If I see a MUD do something, though I never see the code and I make my MUD do it, is there copyright issues there?
-- X
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