May I use the title of Stack Overflow questions as my blog post title?

May I use the title of Stack Overflow questions as my blog post title?

• While I was doing my project I used to come across some issues like "unable to send emails in PHP" then most of the time my Google searches point to Stack Overflow questions. So once I solved my problem with my own experience and Stack Overflow inputs then I would like to write an article on how to solve the same kind of issue with my own content and code, but if I use the title of the Stack Overflow question as my article title with little or no modifications, am I violating the copy right content of Stack Overflow?

• Answer:

  In the United States, the http://copyright.gov/circs/circ34.pdf: Copyright law does not protect names, titles, or short phrases or expressions. Even if a name, title, or short phrase is novel or distinctive or lends itself to a play on words, it cannot be protected by copyright. The Copyright Office cannot register claims to exclusive rights in brief combinations of words such as: [...] Titles of works [...] Under section 102 of the Copyright Act (title 17 of the U.S.Code), copyright protection extends only to “original works of authorship.” [...] To be protected by copyright, a work must contain a certain minimum amount of authorship in the form of original literary, musical, pictorial, or graphic expression. Names, titles, and other short phrases do not meet these requirements. This explanation from the Copyright Office seems sufficient to safely disqualify titles from consideration for copyright protection. Re-use of a title without attribution (especially if it is particularly clever or otherwise artistic) might be plagiarism, which is an ethical issue, but it does not appear to violate copyright law in the United States.