US public TV station risks losing 50TB of archival data in cloud storage standoff
Public broadcaster Nine PBS won a court ruling confirming its right to archival data, but infrastructure provider Iron Mountain is refusing to hand it over because its contract is with a separate storage vendor, OSS.
Public television station Nine PBS is locked in a dispute over access to its archival data, which is stored on servers owned by a company called OSS and housed within Iron Mountain's facility. In March, Nine PBS sent Iron Mountain a letter offering to cover any reasonable costs tied to retrieving the data, after reportedly being unable to get a response from OSS.
Court sides with the station
Nine PBS took the matter to the St. Louis Circuit Court and secured a default judgment against OSS. The court found that Nine PBS has the immediate right to possess its data and ordered OSS to return it and/or help transfer it to a new vendor.
Iron Mountain won't release the data
Despite the ruling, Iron Mountain has declined to hand the data to Nine PBS, saying its contract is with OSS, which owns the physical servers storing the archives. A company spokesperson said Iron Mountain only supplies physical infrastructure — the building, network connectivity, power, and environmental controls — while customers rent space for their own hardware, which remains their asset. As a result, the company says it has no access to data stored on that equipment.
Iron Mountain also warned that releasing the data without a court order could violate data privacy protocols, breach its contract with OSS, and potentially expose confidential data belonging to OSS's other clients.
Station's response
Nine PBS vice president and chief communications officer Leah Freeman said the station welcomed the court's decision, which confirmed Nine PBS's ownership of the archives and set out a path to recover them. She called the materials an important part of the region's history and said the station looks forward to their preservation through the court-approved process. Nine PBS did not respond to questions about whether it has backups of the data or what it will do to prevent a similar situation in the future.
