It's purely for the protection of those documents in their current form. We don't want people selling snippets through compilations, re-distributing them without permission, publishing them etc etc, this is what were trying to avoid... However, All that is really asked of anybody including some code 'as is' in their programs, is to be nice enough to give credit.
As always this comes down to nothing more a moral question really. At the end of the day, i'm not too fussed if people credit or not, it's nice to see the odd "thanks to" in a readme say. Although, I guess it does effect my attitude towards investing more time in producing more snippets in some way..
However, It does needs to noted that any copyright owner, has the right limit re-distribution of the materials and any derivates materials, not only that can disassociate themselves / stop derivate works if so desired. This is guaranteed under the basic rights of copyright. Thus, It's not legal to base a work on another copyrighted work and re-distribute it without permission.
As for the blinking example and your question, it's really simple.
If the blinking code was taken from any copyrighted document. Then legally, Yes it's a breach of the copyright holders rights.. unless the document is public domain to begin with.
However, if you developed code that achieves the same result on your own, there is NO breach, Moreover, if you read a source document/book/web site and thus only take away the method(s) employed. Then develop a recreation on your own, This is also perfectly legal also. As method/principals can not be covered under copyright...
As I said previously, I'm not fussed about the inclusion of code in app's, as really that's what it's there for..
l8r,
Kevin Picone
[url]www.uwdesign.50megs.com[/url]