"The Law and downloaded images." Topic

[My situation involves use of an image in a CD jacket booklet – one of my wife's piano performance CD's -this will be an item that would be sold -So, I'll put it in a gaming context as the law will most likely be the same].

Lets say you are producing a rule set or computer game jacket design or insert- let's say concerning the war of 1812 – and you decide to incorporate a picture of Petr Illych in there. Cruising the web you notice a good picture (on various sites) of Tchaikovsky in his younger years. No credit is given by ANY of the posters (Including a symphony orchestra in the US for Petr's sake!) for this image.
Are there cases where pictures/lithographs/photographs, due to their age or wide dissemination become public domain, and if not – how much due diligence does one need to do to try and track the owner (if there is one) of this image available on the internet? Would I, for instance, have to contact the estate of P.I.Tch. to get permission?
Very new to this. Thanks for any assistance.

And just to stop one potential direction these topics seem to go: No, I neither recast, support recasters or condone any recasting behavior without the expressed written permission of the owner of the mold.

There are a multitude of exceptions, but generally artwork becomes public domain 70 years after the death of its creator under current laws – older works may well have shorter periods of protection, but figuring it out is complicated…. There are all sorts of anomalies as works from the same year can have different (past) laws applying to them depending on their state of publication, but the one reasonably solid date from various legislation is that pre-1923 is public domain, so safe territory.

Dom.

PS – It's not the Kuznetsov painting is it? If so, that's 1893 and fine….

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Thank you for the info.
Actually no, younger… I liked the image because it was not one of the usual one's you see, and The Seasons was written when he was fairly young.

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According to Wikimedia Commons, that image is in the Public Domain.

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Russian composer…Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) as a young man – Picture from 1874.

Definitely fine there, as any photograph of him is necessarily 19th century, so copyright expired for sure.

How about a photograph of the painting?

How about a photograph of the painting?

And that's where things get sticky.

Whereas, yes, the image on the painting itself is public domain, any secondary image of that painting (a photograph, a painted copy, etc.) is not public domain— the rights to it belong to the person who made it (or to anyone they sold said rights to).

On the other hand, what distinguishing factor makes a given photograph different from another of the same image would also come into play.

I'm not an attorney, nor do I play one on TV, so you might want to ask an actual attorney before you simply snag something from the 'Net.