My understanding is that under UK law, as soon as something is created (photograph taken, book/article/whatever written, etc) it is protected by copyright. I'm fairly sure that principle applies in most countries, so the photos are almost certainly copyrighted.
Whether or not it's a problem is another matter. There's an argument for saying that if they don't sue, there's no problem. If you want to keep on the right side of the law, you'd need to get permission, or use photos that specifically say they're licensed under licenses that allow you to use them.
Flickr and Google image search both allow you to search for images that have licenses that allow re-use if you use the advanced search.
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