Nine PBS Owns Its Archive. The Company Holding the Disks Says That Is Not Its Problem

Nine PBS, the public television station in St. Louis, sued Denver-based Iron Mountain Data Centers last month to recover more than 50 terabytes of its own archive, according to the public media outlet Current as reported by Gizmodo ^[1]. The station's problem is not that the files were destroyed; it is that the company physically holding them says its customer was somebody else ^[4].

The chain is ordinary, which is the point. In 2019 Nine PBS signed with a company that later became Open Source Storage for hardware, software and cloud-storage services, and renewed that deal every year ^[8]. OSS, in turn, had its own agreement with Iron Mountain to house the archives in a data center ^[3]. Nine PBS bought storage; it did not buy a relationship with the party that had the racks.

The unwind took weeks. The station tried to set up a renewal meeting in February and got no reply ^[9]. On March 6, the day the contract expired, access disappeared, even though the contract gave Nine PBS 30 days after termination of services to retrieve its files ^[10]. That clause bought the station nothing: the shutoff landed on the expiration date, so none of the 30 days were usable ^[2]. OSS's website was down and the company was listed as delinquent with the Colorado Secretary of State ^[11]. On March 13 Nine PBS wrote to Iron Mountain asking it to preserve and return the archive, offering to pay the costs, and Iron Mountain initially would neither confirm nor deny that it had the material ^[12].

It got stranger. Nine PBS sued OSS in April, then paused the case after James Tramel, who identified himself as a managing partner of a group that had acquired OSS's assets, confirmed the data was sitting in Iron Mountain's Denver facility ^[13]. About a month later Tramel went quiet too; an auto-reply said he was no longer affiliated with OSS, and the station says he later told it by phone that he had been defrauded into buying the company and that it had reverted to its previous owners ^[14].

Then the part that should interest anyone who signs storage contracts: a court ruled Nine PBS owned the data, and the archive still did not come back ^[15]. Iron Mountain acknowledged holding it and initially signaled it wanted to comply, then declined, citing OSS's ownership of the infrastructure the data lives on ^[16]. Ownership of bits and the contractual right to compel their return are separate things, and only one of them was in the station's paperwork. Nine PBS said it had no choice but to sue to force preservation and return ^[17]. A judge has granted temporary relief barring Iron Mountain from deleting or overwriting the data ^[5], and the case had a hearing this week ^[19]. Iron Mountain did not immediately respond to Gizmodo's request for comment ^[18].

What is at stake is more than 70 years of material, including the station's coverage of East St. Louis, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Great Flood of 1993 ^[7]. Six years of clean annual renewals produced no direct claim on the facility ^[1]. Vice President and Chief Communications Officer Leah Freeman said the court confirmed Nine PBS rightfully owns the archives and that the station looks forward to preservation through the court-approved process ^[6].

The modelling exercise is short: name the entity that physically holds your data, and check whether your contract gives you any right against it if your vendor dies. Most resale agreements do not, and the retrieval window you negotiated is worthless if the vendor stops answering email before it starts.