I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. The references I chose may or may not be outdated. If you want to be safe you should contact a lawyer. And possibly the SE staff with the contact button at the bottom of the page.
From
Is it legal to copy Stack Overflow questions and answers?, I will simply copy the accepted answer as it seems to perfectly answer the legal portion of this question. This was in response to a site that copy-pasted a question together with all the answers/comments/... without attribution:
Stack Overflow is licenced under Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Generic, which states:
Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
I think it is pretty clear that they have failed to do this (or any attribution whatsoever). So IMO (and IANAL) no: this usage is not legitimate. But within the terms of the cc-wiki agreement cited re-use is fine.
Edit: the cc-wiki licensing and attribution policy are also linked on every footer page like so.
If you click through to the attribution policy you will find the specifics:
So let me clarify what we mean by attribution. If you republish this content, we require that you:
- Visually indicate that the content is from Stack Overflow, Meta Stack Overflow, Server Fault, or Super User in some way. It doesn’t have to be obnoxious; a discreet text blurb is fine.
- Hyperlink directly to the original question on the source site (e.g., https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12345)
- Show the author names for every question and answer
- Hyperlink each author name directly back to their user profile page on the source site (e.g., https://stackoverflow.com/users/12345/username)
By “directly”, I mean each hyperlink must point directly to our domain in standard HTML visible even with JavaScript disabled, and not use a TinyURL URL or any other form of obfuscation or redirection. Furthermore, the links must not be nofollowed.
From a legal standpoint it seems like you should be fine if you attribute the stuff you copy.
From an ethical standpoint I would personally say that it might be a nice thing to write a comment to the person whose question/answer you want to copy and send them a link to your site in addition to attributing the content your copy. It might also be a nice thing to have a link to the blog/site/... here on Meta, for example in this discussion, in case someone is stumbling across your blog/site/... and wonders about whether this is legal or simply wants to check which questions/answers you copied.
