Violation of Creative Commons license with one's own content

[bob.roberts]

What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? Colorado

I've noticed a particular and rather large website (which I will not name) that hosts a database of content under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License, and they run extensive advertising on every page of theirs. Normally if it was someone else's content I imagine it would be pursuable under copyright infringement by its owner but all of it is either things they wrote themselves as a community or "fair use"-claimed images and text. Since I do not represent the owner of any of their fair use content I cannot do anything about it from their end, however it's still blatant copyright infringement; I would like to know whether I as a citizen would be able to pursue them either civilly or not. Is that possible, and if so is it plausible?

 

[quincy]

What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? Colorado

I've noticed a particular and rather large website (which I will not name) that hosts a database of content under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License, and they run extensive advertising on every page of theirs. Normally if it was someone else's content I imagine it would be pursuable under copyright infringement by its owner but all of it is either things they wrote themselves as a community or "fair use"-claimed images and text. Since I do not represent the owner of any of their fair use content I cannot do anything about it from their end, however it's still blatant copyright infringement; I would like to know whether I as a citizen would be able to pursue them either civilly or not. Is that possible, and if so is it plausible?

No. It is not plausible or possible for you to pursue a legal action on behalf of copyright holders whose works you suspect are being infringed.

You could potentially contact the copyright holders to let them know of the use of their material on the website. They may have agreed to its use.