What I look at answers on Stack Overflow, the lack of copyright notices on the code makes me feel safe to copy it. Same goes for grabbing code from random person's blog.
If they had put explicit copyright notices in the code snippets, I'd assume otherwise.
Your assumptions are likely wrong for those cases.
In the case of a random blog, the code likely does not have an associated license, meaning it is copyrighted and any derivative use of it (i.e. copying it) is a violation of their copyright.
In the case of stackoverflow, their ToS require people who post code to share it under a Creative Commons license [0]. Unfortunately, if the author of the post didn't realize that, it's possible they did not have the original copyright and couldn't make that assignment, so you still may have to do your own due diligence.
Where things work as intended on stackoverflow, you are required to provide attribution.
Your assumptions are backwards, and it sounds like that results in you violating copyright.
I know the assumptions are wrong. But the point is the lack of explicit copyright notices on blogs or SO posts is probably enough to convince most courts that you did not willfully violate copyright. The parent I responded to implied you’d have to convince a court that you thought the copyright expired due to death.
In general I suffer from NIH complex so don’t really copy code from those places ;)
> Where things work as intended on stackoverflow, you are required to provide attribution.
Most(*) small snippets of code (e.g., 1-10 lines) on Stack Overflow are probably not copyrightable, at least not under U.S. law. You don't need a license to copy and use something that's not copyrightable.
