LooseSuits

There are certain "fair use" things that can allow you to use portions with and sometimes without attribution...

Using the whole thing would mean you need to follow the copyright guidelines laid out. If there's no copyright information that doesn't mean it's copyleft or public domain -- you just need to contact the owner for permission (or find out who really owns it, if they're not the person).

The web is full of pirates these days but that doesn't excuse ripping off somebody else's content and posting it without attribution (in other words, posting it as your own).

If you do want to use something from elsewhere, your first port of call should be the owners copyright page. Most people are reasonable and give reasonable leeway in exchange for publicity.

Other people are a little more commercial and may want paying. That choice is yours.

If you're on the other side of the fence of this and somebody is using your content outside of agreed permissions, contact them and request it comes down. Give them a good 48 hours to action it and if there's still no change, go to their ISP/host.

I said this in another thread but most hosts will pull a site for copyright violation within a minute of proof of copyright ownership. A high quality original should do it.

Fair use entails:

The right set forth in Section 107 of the United States Copyright Act, to use copyrighted materials for certain purposes, such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107 sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair: (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

It's quite open to interpretation on blogs, but it's also fairly obvious when something is being used fairly and when it's not. The host will side with the copyright owner 99 times in 100.

Actually I may need to make myself a little clearer about the kind of pictures I am talking about.

It's not about my pictures or my content just in general when someone take say a picture of someone off a site be it dating site or I don't know google images -I have no idea really where the pictures in the case I am referring to come from I know at one time they came from a site where people post their pictures to meet people but not where they come from now - but say a blogger takes a picture of a women and posts it in his blog and then has a bunch of various obscene things to say about the picture or holds a contest of some kind.....you do get what I mean don't you?

I just want to know if this is blatantly against any laws.

That would most probably be illegal and I would add immoral.

I would think it would be illegal, and unethicall...and...it could possibly verge on defamation of character (of the person/s in the picture), which is, in itself, cause to be sued.