[TYPO3-dev] Licensing advice sought on unlabelled code

[Dave Green]

Hi all,
May I ask a spot of advice please? I run an education website 
(www.beep.ac.uk) with hundreds of outgoing links. To make this more 
managable, I'm writing a BE external link validation submodule borrowing 
code from from the link checker published here 
http://members.lycos.co.uk/phplinkchecker/. And once I've finished, I'd 
love to contribute the result back to the T3 community.

The trouble is I can't think of any way to establish precislely what the 
  license terms are for this code.
- the code contains no author or license info whatseoever
- the page was published 4 years ago on a generic freebie page, so the 
owner is not traceable via whois.
- the contact email doesn't work and is from an ISP, so it could be anyone.
- the indicated author's details also don't work and his/her domain has 
expired and is untraceable via whios.

Is this a case of:
1) if you can't PROVE its freeware/GPL, rip it out and find something else.
2) learn from the code and start again from scratch
3) assume it is freeware and use it

What would your collective wisdom suggest?
Many thanks
David Green