Can we "borrow" our answers to populate our own websites?
Second Edit -- to try to expand the scope BEYOND W.SE and to cover any CreativeCommons work, not just here. Deleted part about the badges.
-- Edit -- to clarify it's not quite a BLOG, more a portfolio of teaching resources I've developed.
My website (on a Wordpress core, but mostly a portfolio of my instructional work) is more empty than I want, but I do tend to write in response to a "conversation." One example is my writing here on writing.se, but I also want to include my own comments on some blogs with active discussions in the comments, or my forum posts on spacebattles.
I need to verify, but I'm pretty sure all of them are Creative Commons, at least for the discussion (if not the actual main blog-writer's post, such as Alison's Ask A Manager -- I am pretty sure her columns are copyrighted, but the discussions are CC.)
Using W.SE as a purely hypothetical example of one of many creative-commons places where one can contribute...
Can I do something like:
On writing.stackexchange.com (it would be a link to the specific question) someone asked about ESL characters (quick summary of question), and I responded...
blockquote of my answer
Summary of a few other answers
Maybe me expanding more instructional resources beyond what I put on W.SE, maybe not..
Anyhow -- I want to be sure I'm correctly understanding both Creative Commons and the reuse/remix policies.
1 answer
You have the legal right to reuse elsewhere what you post on Stack Exchange.
It's your content. When posting to SE, you give SE a nonexclusive license to use it, and doing so requires that it's your content to license in the first place; see the terms of use for the details, it's referred to as Subscriber Content.
So nothing legal would prevent you from reposting your own contributions elsewhere, even under a different (non-exclusive) license.
However, others' contributions are only available to you under the terms of CC-BY-SA, unless the copyright holder(s) license it to you on other terms in addition to the blanket license given by posting it to SE in the first place. So in order to use that content, you'd need to either comply with the terms of CC-BY-SA, or obtain a separate license from all contributors to the content you are using.
Copyright applies also to derivative works, but whether a summary constitutes a derivative work in the legal sense or not seems unclear at best. I'm not sure I'd want to go there.
It would be easier to either (a) use only your own content, possibly copied from SE if that's easier for you; and/or (b) use other peoples' contributions verbatim, with appropriate attribution and clearly marked as used under CC-BY-SA.
That should be enough to keep you in compliance with CC-BY-SA.
A good answer is likely to be meaningful even if read without the context of the question, or at the very least should be easy to adapt such that it is even without incorporating the question itself into the answer.
Standard disclaimer, I am not a lawyer (and certainly not your lawyer), yadda yadda.
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