Can you clarify what "downloaded a couple hundred tunes" means? Are we just talking chords and lyrics here, or the actual song file?
Seconding this question - are you talking about, for instance, using DownloadHelper or the like to lift the audio from a YouTube page, or other means of file sharing? 100% illegal, but it's been going on in various times since the beginnings of personal recording devices - I was just reading in Geoff Emmerich's book about engineering for the Beatles how he bought a reel to reel tape deck when he was a teen and would tape songs off the radio. For my slightly younger generation, we did the same on cassette, either off the radio, or later from LPs, or even later from CD. Totally illegal, but as previously stated, not done for profit and "all the kids" did it. Nothing new here.
If you're talking about sheet music/lead sheets/chord charts found on the web, in my opinion (as a lapsed librarian) this is a bit more of a grey area, at least in the US, because of what is called
fair use. Are you using it for educational purposes (your own) and not profiting? Fair use. Are you dowloading it, printing out copies, selling them to people or handing them out in a class that you are being paid for? Um, not fair use.
To me this all actually raises two questions: is it
illegal, and/or is it
unethical? The first is pretty black and white; the latter is more nebulous.