The basics of copyright law (continued)
Downloading a file involves making a copy of it to your computer. Sharing files over a peer-to-peer network involves distributing and performing them publicly, because anyone using the application has access to it.
If you do not have the permission of the copyright holder, and you download and/or distribute their copyrighted material, then you are violating the copyright holder's rights and the law. This is known as copyright infringement.
There is currently no exception in copyright law that allows you to download or distribute whole works without the copyright holder's permission. Copyright law does allow some limited uses of others copyrighted works without the copyright holders permission. This is called Fair Use and will be briefly covered later in this tutorial.
