> You can google an image of any great work of art and look at it for as long as you like, for free and take from it what you can and use all of that to create something else and get paid for that thing.

If the copyright on a given work of art is still active, those pictures were taken and are distributed with the permission of the copyright holder (or they're just pirated). That's one of the reasons it's much easier to find images of classic art (for which the copyright has expired) than it is to find images of contemporary art.

> You don't need to pay for or "borrow" anything to learn from copyrighted works.

What exactly do you think copyright is, and would you be surprised to learn that libraries have purchased the books on their shelves?