A PBS station in St. Louis is taking a data center provider to court to retrieve what the station says is “more than 70 years of history.”
In a lawsuit filed with the Denver District Court against Iron Mountain Data Centers in late July, Nine PBS says that Iron Mountain is refusing to release more than 50TB of archived programming housed at Iron Mountain's data center in Denver. According to the lawsuit, Open Source Storage, the cloud service hosting the archives, went out of business earlier this year and shut off Nine PBS’s access to its material.
Iron Mountain says since OSS owned “the physical services housing the data,” it would not return access to the archives to Nine PBS, according to a story in Current.
The district court judge granted Nine PBS’s request to prevent Iron Mountain from deleting, modifying or overwriting the archives and a hearing was held on Wednesday.
In a statement to Current, Nine PBS VP and CCO Leah Freeman told Current that the broadcaster is “committed to ensuring we can recover and restore full access to this valuable content, which Nine PBS rightfully owns, as it holds significant historical importance for St. Louis.”
Nine PBS had a contract with OSS (identified in the lawsuit as OSS’ predecessor’) starting in 2019 and said in its lawsuit that it had not received any response from OSS earlier this year when it attempted to renew its contract for 2026. Although the contract required 30 days notice before termination of the contract, the lawsuit claims that OSS abruptly ended Nine PBS’s access to its archives on March 6 and that it was only after this that the broadcaster discovered that the cloud provider had gone out of business.
