Nine PBS, a St. Louis-based PBS affiliate, filed litigation against Iron Mountain Data Centers on July 28, seeking to recover approximately 50 terabytes of television content and archival materials stored at one of Iron Mountain’s Denver facilities. The data, accumulated over 70 years, includes coverage of significant regional and national events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, East St. Louis history, and the Great Flood of 1993.
The situation arose after Nine PBS’ cloud storage provider, Open Source Storage (OSS), ceased operations and became unresponsive. The station’s contract with OSS concluded on March 6, but Nine PBS lost access to its data when the agreement expired, despite having what it believed was a 30-day retrieval window. Subsequently, Nine PBS discovered that OSS had become delinquent with the Colorado Secretary of State and was no longer operating. The managing partner of the group that acquired OSS told Nine PBS he had been defrauded and was no longer involved with the company.
Iron Mountain contends it serves solely as a physical infrastructure provider, offering building space, network connectivity, power, and environmental controls to OSS, which maintained the servers housing Nine PBS’ data. The company argues it cannot release the data without proper authorization from OSS due to data privacy obligations and contractual commitments to its customer. In response, a St. Louis Circuit Court previously granted Nine PBS a default judgment against OSS, confirming the station’s right to possess the data.
During a hearing in recent days, a judge ordered Iron Mountain to transfer the physical devices containing the data to Nine PBS. The court stipulated that Nine PBS must engage a qualified third party, including a former OSS employee who has volunteered to assist, to retrieve the data within 30 days while preventing unauthorized access to other OSS clients’ information. Both parties must provide progress updates by September 14, with potential additional hearings if technical complications such as encryption emerge.
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