Is It Legal To Download Any Picture From Facebook To My Pc ?

[John94]

Is it legal to download any picture from Facebook to my PC ?

[Buenchico]

Technically you're 'downloading' an image whenever you visit the relevant page to view it. However saving it to your PC's hard drive (or elsewhere) theoretically requires the consent of the copyright holder.

In practice though it's what you do with the image that's important. If you like a picture of someone's kitten on Facebook, save it to your computer and then use it on your home-made Christmas cards, the copyright holder almost certainly won't know that you've done it and probably wouldn't mind anyway. If they saw their picture used on greetings cards sold in shops though they'd have every right to sue you for using the image without their permission.

You also need to be careful about using images from particularly litigious companies. If, for example, you were to use an image on your own blog where the copyright belonged to The Walt Disney Company, you might well receive some threatening communications from their lawyers. (Lots of members of this site though have avatars sourced from copyright material, including my use of 'Animal' from The Muppets, which is owned by The Walt Disney Company, without anything untoward happening).