Copyright issues

From: Caden (frog_at_nothanks.com)
Date: 11/29/04 

Date: 29 Nov 2004 18:26:19 GMT

I dug out a college textbook help write "my own" Red-Black Tree.
I was going to copy the author's source code and modify it as
needed. But I stumbled across a copyright statement in the source
code. The author was directing the copyright at the CODE, not
the prose explanation or description of how red-black trees
operate or the book he wrote. This seems really really odd.

The Red-Black Tree algorithm obviously wasn't developed by the
author. At best, he ported some code to Java and wrote some
practical implementation details.

Is he justified in claiming copyright? Rudolf Bayer worked out
the algorithm. If anyone had a claim, it would be Bayer. Yet
there's no credit offered to Bayer.

Just curious. Not trying to create a scandal or anything. But
it does seem programmers will defend their code heavily yet not
credit the foundation it was built upon.

I generally want to be safe in what I call fair use. All the
stuff from the 60's, say outlined in Knuth, is used so heavily yet
disregarded for intellectual property. It's almost an early
open source or copyleft policy.

Anyway, I was just going to use this code at will. I don't
think the copyright is justified. Any warnings or comments?

Thanks.