Using articles and books from the internet for assignments

Let's say that I want to use articles and/or books as references in a paper.

Can I do it if I accessed the materials in a illegal way? For example, if I find an article in the internet can I quote it and use it as reference in my assignment? What about books? Assuming I downloaded a book from a random link from the internet, am I allowed to use it as reference? I mean, even in an academic setting, no one will care to find out if I own them right? But once again, don't I have to cite the website? If I cite the website of a book then people will easily see that was downloaded in a illegal way...

When I was in my Science of Education degree I didn't have any of these problems but it was mostly because I'd never look for articles on the internet :P

No one cares if you physically own them or not, since most of the stuff is probably freely accessible any way. If I were to buy a book off amazon, I wouldn't have to reference amazon as a source. So you don't really need to say where you got a book just reference the book it self so others can find it. If an article is reprinted then depending on the format they might want where you read it and the reference going back to the original as well.

As long as you cite the author and title you should be fine, unless the article is only published on the web and in no paper format.

Thanks Alric and melanieb, you both make pretty good points. Unless the article/book is only published on the web (which I'm guessing it's not very common) people can't accuse me of anything, since I can simply say I got it from a colleague.

The thing will be if any colleague asks me for the article/book in question for their own purposes, but I guess they won't care where it came from, as long as they can access the information. Yup, now it makes sense, I was overreacting :P

I don't think anyone will ask you for the book unless it was something super rare. They would probably just go to the library, or down load it off the internet.