As long as you don’t transmit you’re fine, so you can use them as a scanner without a care in the world (although baofengs kind of suck at scanning because they’re so slow). I wouldn’t want to transmit unlicensed, though. You’d be risking some pretty serious fines, especially if you don’t know which bands are safe to transmit on… and if you are going to learn what bands are safe to transmit on you might as well just get a license because it’s not that much harder, and it’s kind of fun. Then you’ll have a lot of permissions and can mess around as much as you want :).