Nine PBS is suing its dead vendor's landlord, and the colo contract holds the keys

Nine PBS, the St Louis public broadcaster, filed suit against Iron Mountain Data Centers in Denver District Court on July 28, seeking access to 50TB of programming and archival material spanning about 70 years ^[1][2]. Its cloud storage vendor, Open Source Storage, cut off access earlier this year having gone defunct, and the company that physically houses the servers says it cannot read them ^[3][4].

The failure mode is contractual, not technical. OSS rented space in Iron Mountain's Denver facility, so the disks sit inside the building, but the hardware is the tenant's ^[5]. Iron Mountain declined Nine PBS's request on the grounds that it neither owns nor operates that hardware ^[4]. In a statement, the company said it "never had access to Nine PBS' data," that it supplies "the building, network connectivity, power, environmental controls," and that handing over third-party hardware without a court order "would have violated basic data privacy protocols, breached our contractual commitments to OSS, and potentially exposed confidential data belonging to other clients of OSS" ^[6][7]. That last clause is the one worth reading twice: the facility's counterparty was the vendor, not the vendor's customers, and multi-tenant hardware makes selective extraction a legal problem before it is an engineering one ^[6][7].

Nine PBS found out the ordinary way. It held an annual cloud storage contract with OSS and got no response when it tried to renew earlier this year, then chased various people associated with the company without success before approaching Iron Mountain directly ^[8][9]. OSS was founded in Colorado in 2004 and its website is offline ^[10].

The courts have moved faster than the vendor did. Nine PBS obtained a temporary order barring Iron Mountain from deleting, modifying, or overwriting the material and directing it to help with recovery ^[11]. At a hearing on Wednesday, Current reported, a judge ruled that Iron Mountain must hand over any physical devices holding the data, and that Nine PBS has 30 days to find a third party, such as a former OSS worker, who can retrieve it without sharing or corrupting other OSS clients' data ^[18]. Nine PBS is already talking to a former OSS employee willing to help, and if the data turns out to be encrypted another hearing will be scheduled ^[19][20]. Both parties must file updates by September 14 ^[21], roughly seven weeks after the case was filed ^[22].

What is at risk is specific. The archive includes pandemic coverage, East St Louis history, and footage of the Great Flood of 1993, when the Mississippi and Missouri burst their banks, killing 50 people ^[12][13]. The Denver Post reported in July that the set runs to more than 11,000 files, and that the lawsuit claims most of it is unique and irreplaceable ^[14][15] - an average of about 4.5GB per file, consistent with raw video rather than transcodes ^[23]. Nine PBS VP and CCO Leah Freeman told Current the material spans "70 years of our organization's history" ^[16]. Iron Mountain, for its part, says it has been transparent throughout and made consistent efforts to help ^[17].

Watch the September 14 filings, and specifically whether encryption keys died with OSS - the order routes recovery through a former employee's knowledge, which is a person-shaped dependency, not a documented one ^[18][19][20]. The transferable lesson is that an exit plan needs to name the facility, the facility's actual counterparty, and who can compel access if the vendor stops answering email ^[4][6][9].