Quote - You write a book on a subject dear to your heart.  Someone at the publisher steals it and minimally re-writes it and publishes it as their own book.  No harm done, right?

That's totally different. That's redistribution and profiting from your efforts.

The OP wants to download images to his computer just for his eyes only to view. By the sounds of it he doesn't want to change the credit or redistribute that image as his own.

Those 2 situations are entirely different.

Regarding the cache being ok, and right clicking and saving not ok..... whose to stop someone from going to their cache and moving a legally downloaded copy of the image to another place on their hard drive?

I am all for protecting artists' work, but so many blow it totally out of proportion to the point that I'm just ready to start telling people that if you don't want your images viewed, saved etc, then don't  post them on the internet or let anyone else see them. Over the years paranoia  and interpretationhas totally made copyright such a complicated thing and turned it into something that is totally different than its original design... to prevent the hoarding of art.

I write poetry and short stories. I am very protective of my writing because I put so much of myself and my life experiences into my writing. I don't post them on the internet, and I let very few people actually read anything I write. I have been offered publishing deals twice and in the end turned it down because my writing is so personal to me that I would feel totally exposed and vulnerable if it were mass published.

My art on the other hand while I consider it "mine", it doesn't bother me if people hack it up and use it in tags etc, just so long as they aren't saying "I made this!"

If someone wants to save my images to use as their wallpaper I have no problem with that.

"It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never
able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us.
This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good
heart whatever they might have to say." - Ghandi