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I'm using some codes that I modified, from Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming to create another project, the project is released under GPL V2.
The License agreement is written here, it says: Copyright © 1998-2002 by Peter Norvig.
My question is: Were's almost in 2014, do I still have to include that license or did it expire and therefore I may use the codes anyway that I like?
Copyright generally does not expire until 50 or 70 years after the death of the person who wrote it.
Therefore, you must still license your own project under the GPL v2.
The copyright line doesn't refer to the code, but to the license itself. The time span does not determine until when the copyright is active, but during which time span the copyrighted subject was created and/or modified. This is not relevant here.
You are not free to use the code in any way you like: You have to adhere to the license which you linked to:
In addition to marking the section of code which are based on Mr. Norvigs work, I would think crediting him with a sentence like
Parts of this software are based on code from Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming by Peter Norvig. See <
http://norvig.com/paip.html>.
in your copyright statement would be appropriate.
I am not a lawyer, so you should really consider seeing one.
As with all legal questions - you really should ask a lawyer.
But a short answer: the date in the copyright is when changes were made by that author, not any indication of copyright expiry. The original author worked on the code between 1998 and 2002 - those changes are still under copyright, and will be for a some while longer.
