Legal Issues

I have been doing some research online and found out that any image or creation made after 1989 is copyrighted, and you can get in a whole lot of legal trouble if you use it without permission. Hence, why I removed any picture that I didn't take myself from this blog. But I do have a question: How is it that almost everyone on Google Images has copied other people's pictures and posted them on their own blogs and never got sued? Literally, there are copies of the same picture all over the place in various blogs, but no one seems to care. Does the copyright law only apply if you're making money from the copyrighted image?