08/18/2026
Oh.
The legal action involves a single local affiliate, Nine PBS in St. Louis, rather than national PBS. The station sued Iron Mountain Data Centers on July 28, 2026, to recover roughly 50 terabytes of historical programming spanning 70 years after their intermediate cloud vendor, Open Source Storage (OSS), went defunct. The data is physically intact in a Denver facility, but access is blocked due to a contractual dispute over infrastructure ownership.
Background and Dispute Details
* The Affected Archive: Contains over 50TB of video clips, local history, and major regional events like the 1993 floods and the COVID-19 pandemic.
* The Breakdown: Nine PBS tried to renew its contract with OSS earlier in the year, but OSS became unreachable and apparently went out of business.
* The Legal Stalemate: OSS stored the data inside Iron Mountain Data Centers, but Iron Mountain has withheld the files because OSS owned the physical server infrastructure housing the data, leaving Nine PBS locked out.
* Current Status: Nine PBS secured a default judgment against OSS and filed the separate Denver District Court action against Iron Mountain to force the handover of their digital property.
(Source: AfoTech)
