Is it legal to use movie frames or actor images as online avatars?
<p>Browsing around social networks and this community, I see that there are users that use pictures of actors from TV series as their avatar. </p>

<p>I don't want to point to anyone's profile to give an example, but I saw any kind of copyrighted material used as icon or avatar: characters from animated cartoons or videogames, actors faces taken from frames of famous TV series, softwares icons, famous paintings (full or details), etc...</p>

<p>Is it legal to use copyrighted materials for a "small thing" as an avatar or icon?</p>

<p>Such conduct might be judged as passing the tests of fair use, under which circumstances copying is not infringement. Though it is not educational, such use is non-commercial, and depending on context could be (positively) seen as sociopolitical commentary. It clearly passes the substantiality test since it amounts to copying a zillionth of the original work, and it's hard to see how such a use could have any (negative) effect on the market value of the original. To the extent that the use "transforms" the original, that favors a fair use analysis. (For example, directly uploading a rescaled version of a jpeg from the studio is not very transformative, but capturing a frame from a movie and selecting Rowan Atkinson's head would be transformative). <a href="http://copyright.gov/fair-use/fair-index.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">This index</a> gives you a number of fair case rulings, where you can see what courts have found to be fair versus unfair.</p>

copyright fair-use