ALL FANSUBBING IS ILLEGAL because of this treaty the US signed (bern convention?) that upholds all international copyrights. since japan also signed that treaty, anything that's copyrighted in japan is also copyrighted in the US. so in effect your friend is right, sorry.
the difference between licensed anime and licensed anime is that in the case of licensed anime, an american company has purchased the rights to distribute the anime in the US. as a result, many fansubbers see the subbing of licensed material as pointless and redundant, because a perfectly good (and in most cases better than the fansub) version is already easily available.
unlicensed anime, meanwhile, is not available in the US, and will not be available in the forseeable future (aka no american company admits to having the rights to the series). as a result, the only purchasable dvds are in japan, in R2 region encoding (not readable by unmodified US dvd players), and unsubbed.
fansubbing originated to bring awareness to such titles that would ordinarily go unnoticed. i know that live-evil would like to continue the trend of making the public aware of anime that is not freely available outside of japan, rather than just making a free alternative.
so while l-e fansubs are illegal, they're selectively illegal
also it's important to note that companies in japan generally seem to be a lot more relaxed with upholding their copyright than american companies, at least in terms of derivative works (an entire doujinshi scene has erupted because of this)...........in short, they like the free promotion. so until a japanese company tells a fansubbing group to stop fansubbing (which i've never seen happen ever) i can assume they dont care what happens as far as fansubbing goes.