# Stop sketching, little girl -- those paintings are copyrighted! - Author: Joichi Ito - Date: 2005-01-09T07:10:26Z Xeni @ Boing Boing BlogStop sketching, little girl -- those paintings are copyrighted! Museum security guard told a child to stop sketching paintings in a museum -- because they're copyrighted. It is standard operating procedure for students of art to learn by example by sketching masterpieces in an art museum. A budding artist in Durham found that the time honored tradition was challenged while seeking inspiration at the Matisse, Picasso and the School of Paris: Masterpieces from the Baltimore Museum of Art exhibit in Raleigh. Over the weekend at the North Carolina Museum of Art there were works by Matisse, Picasso, Monet, Degas and some Illanas. Julia Illana is a second grader who was visiting the popular exhibit there with her parents and was sketching the paintings in her notebook. "I love to draw in my notebook," Illana said. Her sketch of Picasso's Woman with Bangs, which came out pretty good, and Matisse's Large Reclining Nude got the promising artist into trouble with museum security. A museum guard told Julia's parents that sketching was prohibited because the great masterpieces are copyright protected, a concept that young Julia did not understand until her mother explained the term.Link (Thanks, Cowicide)If you follow the link, you will find that the museum realized its mistake and apologizes to the girl because, of course, there is no copyright infringement here. What is scary about this story is, just like the notion that ideas (vs the expression of ideas) can and should should be "owned", wrong ideas about copyright propagate very quickly like some bad urban legend and cause this sort of "ignorance creep." --- #### Categories Intellectual Property