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. 13 shown for “Knight Chess Piece” — 64 records examined, 40 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-27 05:46 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Knight Chess Piece
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1250

Metal fragment from "The Great Eastern" ship that lay the Atlantic Cable
Artist not stated in the record

Chess Piece, Knight
Artist not stated in the record · 8th–10th century

Chess Piece in the Form of a Knight
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1500

Chess Piece in the Form of a Knight
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1510–30

Chess set
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1800

Chess Piece, Rook
Artist not stated in the record · 11th–12th century

Chess Piece in the Form of a King
Artist not stated in the record · 1350–1400

Chess Piece, Knight
Artist not stated in the record · 8th–10th century

Chess Piece, Pawn
Artist not stated in the record · 9th–14th century
Chess Piece, Bishop
Artist not stated in the record · 8th–10th century

Bishop Chess Piece
Artist not stated in the record · 1150–1200

Chess Piece, Pawn
Artist not stated in the record · 9th–12th century
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. 475 matched · 24 examined · 2 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.12 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 28205 matched · 40 examined · 38 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.2 shown
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-08-27 05:46 UTC, during this request. 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.