It's pretty obvious Paley Museum has no intention of restoring them, they have had possession of the original QP since the 1990s and has made no attempts to restore nor allows anyone else to do it. You can listen to them if you go there in their "listening room", but you are not permitted to record them or even touch them yourself.
I don't understand the reason in that.
Surely with today's technology there must be a way to surreptitiously record them while listening. They may own the physical copy, but they don't own the rights, and the recordings are almost certainly in the public domain in any event.
Surely with today's technology there must be a way to surreptitiously record them while listening. They may own the physical copy, but they don't own the rights, and the recordings are almost certainly in the public domain in any event.
Well that's the problem, Paley can not legally make public copies or distribute them in any way. Although it owns the physical copies of all it's OTR material, it owns none of the copyrights, so they can not make Quiet Please copies without explicit permission from the copyright holder— and that's the problem, because Quiet Please copyright status is murky due to pre-1972 copyright laws, -- and despite the fact no one has ever been able to find any copyrighted status for QP —the Paley Center still cannot legally distribute copies without risking infringement claims.
The Radio Spirits company had also researched for a QP series copyright and found none, so they went ahead and distributed their inferior copies of QP in limited numbers at their own risk. But Paley Museum in New York (who has the only original disc) can't do that because they're required to protect the integrity and legal standing of its collection, so visitors may only use individual listening booths inside the building, but "absolutely forbids" any filming, taping, or copying of programs in the collection.
The problem is no one can prove QP is not copyrighted material.
Brief history of where the available QP copies came from..
All radio programs in the 1940s were distributed on 16" disc, similar to a LP record, they held 15 minutes per side. After distribution and play they were eventually discarded, simply tossed in the trash.Cooper did hold on to his own copies but said he had thrown them out in the 1950s during a move. The only reason any of the QP episodes exist today is because Chappell (the host and primary actor) had also kept his disc from WOR, which later in the mid 1960s also transferred them to reeled tapes.. The book Terror on the Air quotes him on Page 161:
".. He [Chappell] wrote to Cooper's widow Emily in 1966 to report that he owned copies of all but 11 episodes on transcription discs and had copied them all to reel to reel tape. Stating that he would happily copy any episodes for Emily, he further wrote that "It took a lot of hours to make the tape transfers but I got a big thrill out of hearing them all over again and I want to say that there were many occasions when my emotions blew up and I just plain bawled. They brought back such wonderful times and so many intimate memories of such a treasured friend" .."
Ernest Chappell died at the age of 80 in 1983 and his widow then donated his entire collection to a Florida University, and they sat there unknown for about 5 years until Don Aston (Twice serving on the SPERDVAC Board of Directors (Society to Preserve and Encourage Radio Drama, Variety and Comedy and AVPRO CEO), described his discovery in an 2009 article in 'OTR Digest':
"I found the Quiet Please episodes at the University of Florida. A work Study student dubbed the discs. The University would not allow any outside people to touch them. The Work Study Student did not clean or even bother to wipe off the discs,. He just put them on a turntable and dropped the needle. That is the reason so much noise is on many of the early surviving episodes. Mrs. Chappell was going to let us, Randy [Eidemiller] and Me, copy the discs, but negotiations dragged on and on. Then the discs wound up in the OTR Museum in New York City"
It's too bad he wasn't able to record them properly himself, but it's a lucky thing he was at least granted that a university student to do it for him - even that, it appears was against the rules, but if he hadn't of then there would have been no copies of QP available today other than the 12 episodes which were already well circulated available amongst collectors .
It was sometime in the 1990s that the original disc got transferred and locked away in Paley Museum, which incidentally holds three of the missing episodes that have not been heard since the 1940s.