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A friend of mine uses limewire to download stuff for free. he says that downloading stuff for free is not illegal if the thing being downloaded doesn't have a license. is that true?
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But I think that it is OK to download things in the public domain, or that have been licensed (through a Creative Commons license for instance) for public distribution. Anything else could be considered a violation of copyright.
Go back and listen to the Lawrence Lessig interview. This is very, very confusing. There is a reason for the Creative Commnons license. Everything is kind of automatically copyrighted. Unless there is some kind of license where the content maker explicitly says what can and can't be done, downloading is illegal, even if the content maker doesn't care. Thus, the need for Creative Commons.
However, since most of the stuff on P2P and bittorrent isn't Creative Commons or GPL, you are generally stealing.
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