[Demented]

What I'm asking is in what law does it state that it is illegal for me to download or read a copyrighted work that I haven't purchased. People do it all the time by loaning books or watching other peoples DVD's. I understand that it illegal to distribute copyrighted works, but in the act of downloading a book from a file share or whatever, what law am I breaking. Even if you break it down on a purely physical level. The distributor is sending me the bytes and I am saving them. At no point am I 'cloning' the file. As far as I know, the only prosecutions have been targeted at people who made files available for download, not the actual consumer side of the equation. In fact, I've had the publisher give away non-drm'd copies of books such as Elantris with no prohibition on distribution, yet the book is still under copyright and I have no 'receipt'.