Copyright and you:
To start with, all images (photographic, moving picture, painted, sculpted or drawn) and texts (books, song lyrics) – are covered by national and international copyright law. This is automatic as soon as the image is created.
Copyright covers the creator’s Right to control how their work is Copied, and under what terms. A copyright on a work does not expire for 70 or 95 years (depending what country) so even if a photo is not available commercially, it is not free unless the copyright owner grants public use terms.
So for most photos and images, using them without the permission of the copyright owner is almost always not legal. Offering downloads of copyrighted images, movies and music without permission is also not legal.
A misconception is that it is OK if you post credit of where you got it from. It’s not. It also does not matter whether your use is non-profit or not. There are certain circumstances where using a minor portion of a work non-commercially for the purposes of education, news reporting or parody is permissible (Fair Use in the USA, Fair Dealing in Canada).
How to get legal images
There are several ways you can use images;
The first way is to contact the copyright owner, and ask for permission. They may grant permission, deny it, or grant it subject to some terms and conditions. It can be hard to track down the owner, start with looking at the bottom of the website for the copyright statement and contact information. Keep in mind that the owner of the Website copyright may not be the owner of the photo, they may be using it with permission (or without). Just because its hard to get permission doesn’t mean you get a free pass.
The second way is to use images is to choose images that have been released with an open license or a Creative Commons license. These can be freely used, usually you need to include attribution to the creator, and some have restrictions on commercial use.
Here is the link to Flickr’s Creative Commons library www.flickr.com/creativecommons/
WikiMedia commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Free Photobank http://www.freephotobank.org/main.php
Here’s how to search Google Images for creative commons licensed images googleblog.blogspot.ca/2009/07/find-creative-commons-images-with-image.html