Is it Piracy???

If YOU didn't buy it, and got it for free, then yea it's piracy. A felony with a $250,000 fine per charge.

But you'll be ok. Don't worry.

Yes it is. Someone may buy a reproduction (CD or Mp3) of a song but they do not buy the "rights" - the copy right - to the song. So even if your friend lends you the disk or uploads it, by using/downloading it, you are violating copyright law. Will you get caught? Probably not.

Can you live with using someone else's work without paying for it? personally, I expect to get paid for my work and I make sure I pay for other people's work, including artists. If you think that they are really just big bad corporations scooping up profits, well, all sorts of people work at those corporations putting food on the table for their families too. And profits, thanks largely to piracy and a laissez-faire attitude to it, are down so much that smaller companies are folding all over the place. Which makes the few, large survivors more powerful and larger in relation to the overall market.