Two archives, queried live.
Every record below comes from The Met or Smithsonian Open Access and was filtered on that archive’s own rights field before it reached this page. 6 shown for “Buddy Esquire, American, 1959 - 2014” — 41 records examined, 35 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-04 14:28 UTC · served from cache, not re-queried for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Flier for a rap battle in the Bronx designed by Buddy Esquire
Buddy Esquire, American, 1959 - 2014 · 1979

Flier for “Ecstasy Garage Disco” designed by Buddy Esquire
Buddy Esquire, American, 1959 - 2014 · February 17, 1980

Flier for "Skate Fever’s 1st Annual Speed Skating Contest"
Buddy Esquire, American, 1959 - 2014 · October 30, 1983

Flyer for Shearer Players' production of Angel Street
New York Esquires, Inc., American · 1951

Program for the Shearer Players' production of Angel Street
New York Esquires, Inc., American · 1951

Residence of Sherman Paris, Esquire, from the album Views of Charlestown, New Hampshire
Gotthelf Pach, active 1880s · 1888
Where these records came from.
Two archives are wired, and only two. Each one is filtered on its own rights field — never on a title match, and never on the presence of an image file.
- The Met Collection API (Open Access)Rights field:
isPublicDomain. 1 matched · 1 examined · 1 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.0 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 1115244 matched · 40 examined · 34 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.6 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-04 14:28 UTC, replayed here rather than repeated. A completed pass is kept for 24 hours and replayed for an identical search, which is what keeps repeated queries inside Smithsonian’s 30-requests-per-hour allowance. A pass in which either archive failed to answer is never kept — an outage must not be replayed as though it were a finding about the catalogue.
Wikimedia Commons and the Library of Congress are deliberately not wired. Wikimedia was confirmed, on a live query, to return CC-BY material inside the same result set as genuine public domain works, and filtering it safely has not been designed yet. loc.gov was blocked by bot detection during the source evaluation, so its rights vocabulary has never been observed — and nothing here is built on a field nobody has read.
An image file is a rights claim. It never travels without its field.