Hello, Tom,

First the groundrules: Legal advice on a question such as this cannot be obtained by a public posting on a web service such as LawGuru.com. Legal advice is only available within a confidential attorney-client relationship. What CAN be obtained is general commentary on the legal issues that are pertinent to the analysis of the question.

It seems to me that two principal issues are: (1) if a copyrighted image of a grand stairway is used as you describe, would it be actionable copyright infringement? (2) if the answer to issue (1) is yes, how does one deal with the fact that the only identified owner of copyright seems to be out of existence?

To answer issue (1), one would need to consider whether the proposed use is an unlawful copying of the copyrighted work. See www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-infringement.html A court case that considered a similar question involved the depiction of the scuplture Zanja Madre in the filming of Batman Forever. See www.benedict.com/visual/batman/batman.aspx

For a general discussion of the issue see www.rohde-victoroff.com/html/fine_art_of_film.pdf

Issue (2) arises because the work to be copied from seems to be an "orphan." This problem has been publicly discussed in connection with leglslation that has been proposed to allow copying from "orphan works" in certain circumstances. See www.copyright.gov/docs/regstat031308.html

It's interesting that Google Books' highly publicized court settlement of its effort to create a contemporary digital Library of Alexandria would get around the "orphan works" problem by the mechanism of a federal court class action settlement with the Authors' Guild as a representative of all authors and the Association of American Publishers. However, recent criticism of the proposed result by certain competitors of Google and by European publishers has kept the pot boiling. Stay tuned for court's final hearing on the proposed Google Books settlement scheduled for October 7, 2009.