PBS Station Sues to Regain Access to 70 Years of Archival TV History

Key Points:

• Nine PBS in St. Louis filed a lawsuit against Iron Mountain Data Centers to recover over 50 terabytes of archival material after its cloud provider, Open Source Storage (OSS), abruptly cut off access and went defunct.
• OSS had stored Nine PBS's data at Iron Mountain's facility, but Iron Mountain has refused to return the archives, citing OSS’s ownership of the physical infrastructure housing the data.
• The archives, spanning more than 70 years, include important regional historical coverage such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the Great Flood of 1993.
• Nine PBS discovered OSS’s sudden disappearance in March when it lost access to its data despite contractual rights to retrieve files, and attempts to negotiate with OSS’s supposed new owners failed amid claims of fraud and ownership disputes.
• A court has ruled that Nine PBS owns the data and granted temporary relief preventing Iron Mountain from deleting or overwriting the archives while the legal dispute continues.