GoKawiilNine PBS in St. Louis filed a lawsuit against information management corporation Iron Mountain Data Centers July 28, seeking to recover over 50 terabytes of archival materials stored in one of the company’s Denver-based data centers.
The lawsuit filed in Denver District Court alleges that the station’s cloud-storage vendor, Open Source Storage, abruptly cut off access to Nine PBS’ data earlier this year without warning. It states OSS, which had a separate relationship with Iron Mountain to provide data storage, went “defunct,” leaving Nine PBS’ archives in a data center operated by Iron Mountain.
Iron Mountain has refused to return the materials to the station because its client, OSS, technically owned “the physical services housing the data” within Iron Mountain, according to the complaint.
The station requested temporary and preliminary relief that would prevent Iron Mountain from deleting, modifying or overwriting its materials in the suit. A district judge granted the motion and set a hearing for Wednesday.
In a statement to Current, Nine PBS VP and CCO Leah Freeman confirmed the station’s lawsuit against Iron Mountain and its dedication to retrieving the archival materials and programming, which she says span over “70 years of our organization’s history.”
“We are 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.”
According to the lawsuit, the blocked materials include historical items such as Nine PBS’ coverage on the history of East St. Louis, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Great Flood of 1993, which ravaged along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.
‘No choice but to file’
Nine PBS entered a relationship with a company described in the complaint as “OSS’ predecessor” in 2019. This unidentified vendor provided “hardware, software and cloud-storage services” for storing the public broadcaster’s archival materials and other data.
Nine PBS renewed its contracts with the data services vendor and subsequently OSS annually, the complaint states.
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