What happened, according to the lawsuit, is this. In 2019, Nine PBS entered into an agreement with a “predecessor” to a company that came to be known as Open Source Storage and renewed its contract with the company yearly. The company stored the station’s archive seemingly without issue until this past February, when Nine PBS tried to schedule a meeting with OSS to renew the agreement; OSS didn’t respond. Soon after, people with Nine PBS discovered that their access had been cut off, that OSS’s website was defunct and that the company had delinquency status with the Colorado Secretary of State.
Upon investigation, the station learned that OSS had a relationship with the company Iron Mountain Data Centers. OSS is the cloud storage vendor, while Iron Mountain owns the data center. Nine PBS eventually learned that Iron Mountain possessed this data after OSS had been purchased by a new buyer, who then claimed he was defrauded into buying the company, and the ownership reverted to its previous owners. All the while, Nine PBS was still trying to get its data back, eventually filing a lawsuit against Iron Mountain to get the data back. At first, Iron Mountain seemed willing to comply, but changed its tune, arguing that OSS still owned “the physical services housing the data.” The station has requested temporary and preliminary relief to prevent the company from modifying or deleting any of its data.
Tech bureaucracy shenanigans aside, the situation for Nine PBS is less than ideal, to put it mildly. According to Currents, the materials in question are historical in nature, including Nine PBS’s coverage of COVID-19, the Great Flood Of 1993, and the history of East St. Louis.
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