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Content on SE sites is licensed under CC-BY-SA.

If I write a question/answer on your sites, do I still have copyright of the text I entered or does SE now hold all copyright to it? Can I put an answer I wrote on my blog without meeting any of the attribution requirements?

I'm not intending to do so; I am just trying to learn about how the license works better.

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do I still have copyright of the text I entered? ... IE, can I put an answer I wrote on my blog without meeting any of the attribution requirements?

Yes and yes. All you did by publishing it under CC-Wiki was grant SE the non-exclusive, irrevocable right to publish the text under the license's terms. Meaning that legally, you can't take it back from SE. But you are still the owner and copyright holder of what you wrote.

You can re-publish the text under any terms you wish - you could even put it into a book and sell it. That republication will have no connection to Stack Overflow and the CC-Wiki license.

However, while the book will of course be protected and can't be freely copied, the text you published on SO remains freely usable under the terms of the CC-Wiki license.

enter image description here

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  • Thanks! Can SE put my content in say a book and publish it without attribution to me theoretically?
    – Tom
    Commented Apr 30, 2011 at 13:40
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    @Tom no. They are bound by the terms of the CC-Wiki license, so they have to give proper attribution. They can put it into a book and sell it as long as they attribute it to you. Everybody else can also put it into a book and sell it, but they have 1.) to attribute it to you and 2.) to Stack Overflow.
    – Pekka
    Commented Apr 30, 2011 at 13:42
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    @Tom you're welcome! I had great fun composing the accompanying scientific illustration. :)
    – Pekka
    Commented Apr 30, 2011 at 14:02
  • Can I sell my account details and hence transfer my attribution to someone else...? ;-)
    – Arjan
    Commented Apr 30, 2011 at 15:15
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    @Pekka웃 beautiful picture, you have missed your calling ;) +1 great answer
    – user310756
    Commented Aug 5, 2013 at 6:36
  • I'd point out that search engines might dock you for exact duplicate text from other resources, so you're better off having one original source and blockquoting it everywhere else to emphasize that fact for SEO.
    – animuson StaffMod
    Commented Aug 25, 2013 at 19:28

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