The trick is to ensure that your 'theft' is only a small component of your piece. If your piece consists solely of the theft, then you are not an artist, you are a plagiarist and you have created nothing of interest or value, which is the case with - to give two examples - The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony and the entire career of contemporary visual artist Damien Hirst.
True art contains tiny elements of derivation bolstered by massive planks of original innovation, e.g: Strawberry Fields Forever, the paintings of Van Gogh. Trilling's famous phrase 'Immature artists imitate, mature artists steal' has been misunderstood and appropriated by weak artists to justify their own substitution of plagiarism for creation in the face of their own inability to innovate.
