[tokenrove]

Reading code is essential to growth as a programmer. I do it all the time, often for pleasure. But reading snippets without context, like you're suggesting, is a common source of bugs in my experience.

So often when working on a legacy codebase, I'll track down a bug to some bit of code that makes no sense, and then search for that code and find it on Stack Overflow or similar. Even examples from documentation can be dangerous taken out of context; I can think of numerous times I encountered this with snippets that had been copied directly from MSDN without understanding.

Given that poorly-understood code reuse was implicated in many of our industry's greatest disasters, maybe the legality isn't what our concern should be here.