A copyright is automatically in place when an "author" creates a work. It becomes a legal issue when this work is published. For some useful info see:
http://216.239.57.100/search?q=cache...hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Downloading copyrighted music (and ALL published music is copyrighted) is illegal. The author does not have to explicitly forbid its distribution. The other post is correct - LW or any p2p software are definitely not illegal. Its use for distribution and downloading copyrighted info is though. I'm not making a judgement here - just clarifying some misleading or incorrect info above.
Norm