- Nine PBS in St. Louis sues to recover roughly 50 terabytes of archive spanning seven decades after cloud vendor Open Source Storage went defunct and cut off access on the day its contract expired
- Iron Mountain says it never had access to the data, arguing it rents physical space to OSS and that handing over a third party’s hardware would have breached its contracts and exposed other clients’ data
- A Denver judge has since ruled that Nine PBS owns the material and ordered cooperation on retrieval within 30 days
Nine PBS, the public television station in St. Louis, has sued Iron Mountain Data Centers in Denver District Court, seeking the return of roughly 50 terabytes of archival material sitting in a Denver facility.
This move was necessitated by its contracted cloud storage provider, Open, which quietly went defunct earlier in 2026
The legal brief has since prompted District Court Judge Eric Elliff to rule that Nine PBS is the rightful owner of the materials and is entitled to recover them, and to order Iron Mountain to cooperate in every way it can with the retrieval.
How did a station lose its own archive of data?
Nine PBS’s relationship with what it calls the predecessor of Openthe latter to supply hardware, software, and cloud storage services for the station’s archival materials
The contract was renewed annually, first with its predecessor and then with OSS itself, until recently, when it tried to arrange a meeting to renew the contract for 2026. OSS did not respond, nor did it indicate any intention to end the arrangement.
The agreement was due to expire on March 6th, and the contract essentially allowed PBS an additional 30 days to retrieve its data after termination. However, when access was cut off, PBS received no response or path to access its data. Instead, when looking for an explanation, it found out that the OSS website no longer existed and that the company had a delinquency status with the Colorado Secretary of State.
Further digging helped the TV station find a link to Iron Mountain, and on March 13, Nine PBS sent a demand letter asking the data center operator to preserve and return its material, offering to cover any reasonable costs incurred. Iron Mountain neither confirmed nor denied that it held any of the material.
Nine PBS sued OSS and its president Charles Wells in St. Louis Circuit Court on April 16, then paused the case when a man named James Tramel, described as a managing partner of the group that had acquired OSS’s assets, confirmed the data was safe in Iron Mountain’s Denver facility.
Tramel corresponded with the station for about a month, then stopped. An automatic reply from his account later said he was no longer affiliated with OSS. On a subsequent call, according to the complaint, Tramel said he had been defrauded into buying the company.
A data custody issue with multiple players involved
With no one at OSS responding, Nine PBS returned to the St. Louis court and won a default judgment establishing that it owned the data, had an immediate right to possess it, and that OSS had to return it or facilitate its transfer to a new vendor. This was not particularly effective: asking a company that refuses to pick up the phone to honor a judgment is impractical, and the station was forced to file again in Denver, where the data was hosted.
Iron Mountain told Current it never had access to the data. Its position is that it supplies physical infrastructure, meaning the building, network connectivity, power, and environmental controls, while customers rent space for their own servers and hardware. Those machines are the client’s assets, and in this case the client was OSS, not Nine PBS. The contention is essentially the equivalent of a landlord not being responsible for the contents of a tenant’s filing cabinet, even when the tenant vanishes.
The order Nine PBS secured from a judge in the second case states that it must identify a third-party vendor, potentially a former OSS employee, who can access and retrieve the data from the infrastructure inside Iron Mountain’s facility, and it has 30 days to do so.
The station will pay Iron Mountain current and past-due storage fees dating from when OSS stopped paying its own bills. Return any physical devices holding the data immediately once access is granted, and it must ensure that no other OSS customer’s data is retrieved or compromised as a result.
The material at stake includes the station’s coverage of the history of East St. Louis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Great Flood of 1993; Nine PBS vice president and chief content officer Leah Freeman puts the span at approximately 70 years of the organization’s history.
Whether the legal battle that Nine PBS had to endure is worth it, skipping an easy-to-set-up NAS server with relatively inexpensivedrivesat its own premises is an interesting question and one that it is sure to be asking itself, as it has yet to be provided access to its own archives at the time of writing.
