Is tracing art theft?
When someone creates a piece of artwork they hold the copyright. The law states that the minute you have created you artwork, or lay pen to paper, that it belongs to you, but even then only three changes need to be made to your design for it to be sufficiently different to not be classed as copyright infringement. For normal pieces of art, unless you are famous, no one really tends to copy it. For painters that copy the work of old masters it is normally ok because the copyright of a work only usually lasts for seventy years after the death of the artist – unless it belongs to a museum and they have copyrighted the image for use on their promotional material, but normally you can see artists sitting in museums trying their hand at imitating the old works of art.
