This is not fair use. No court has ever held that it's fair use to reproduce copyright images because you think they look cool, you think they're funny, you think they illustrate some point you're trying to make, etc. And using an image of DeNiro as your avatar does not even begin to approach a legally acceptable form of parody.
Just because hardly anybody ever gets sued for using copyrighted images as avatars, as humorous blog illustrations, and so on, doesn't mean that they couldn't be sued — and the copyright holder would unquestionably prevail.
Using the US courts 4-factor analysis where in particular do you think this use - of a low-pixel screencap transformed as an avatar - fails?
Do you happen to know the jurisdiction applicably here, as it's behind Cloudfront the location of the servers are hidden. Clearly there's the .re domain. It might be considered that Cloudfront's proxying causes a US jurisdiction claim of infringement to be pertinent no matter where the files are hosted, but that moves rather to my point that it's not a simple analysis and so the vilification of the alleged infringer seems unwarranted at this time.
>No court has ever held that it's fair use to reproduce copyright images because you think they look cool //
Low-pixel copies of images have been allowed for various purposes. Are you saying this particular issue has been addressed by the courts, I'm not aware of it, could you post the details? Thanks.
Just because hardly anybody ever gets sued for using copyrighted images as avatars, as humorous blog illustrations, and so on, doesn't mean that they couldn't be sued — and the copyright holder would unquestionably prevail.