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Home›System/Policy›Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data

System/Policy<br>Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data<br>By Francisco Rodriguez<br>August 11, 2026

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By Billy Hathorn - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

Nine PBS in St. Louis filed a lawsuit against information management corporation Iron Mountain Data Centers July 28, seeking to recover over 50 terabytes of archival materials stored in one of the company’s Denver-based data centers.

The lawsuit filed in Denver District Court alleges that the station’s cloud-storage vendor, Open Source Storage, abruptly cut off access to Nine PBS’ data earlier this year without warning. It states OSS, which had a separate relationship with Iron Mountain to provide data storage, went “defunct,” leaving Nine PBS’ archives in a data center operated by Iron Mountain.

Iron Mountain has refused to return the materials to the station because its client, OSS, technically owned “the physical services housing the data” within Iron Mountain, according to the complaint.

The station requested temporary and preliminary relief that would prevent Iron Mountain from deleting, modifying or overwriting its materials in the suit. A district judge granted the motion and set a hearing for Wednesday.

In a statement to Current, Nine PBS VP and CCO Leah Freeman confirmed the station’s lawsuit against Iron Mountain and its dedication to retrieving the archival materials and programming, which she says span over “70 years of our organization’s history.”

“We are committed to ensuring we can recover and restore full access to this valuable content, which Nine PBS rightfully owns, as it holds significant historical importance for St. Louis.”

According to the lawsuit, the blocked materials include historical items such as Nine PBS’ coverage on the history of East St. Louis, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Great Flood of 1993, which ravaged along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.

‘No choice but to file’

Nine PBS entered a relationship with a company described in the complaint as “OSS’ predecessor” in 2019. This unidentified vendor provided “hardware, software and cloud-storage services” for storing the public broadcaster’s archival materials and other data.

Nine PBS renewed its contracts with the data services vendor and subsequently OSS annually, the complaint states.

When Nine PBS attempted to schedule a meeting with OSS in February to discuss renewing for 2026, OSS didn’t respond or indicate “any intention not to renew the agreement.” The agreement was set to expire on March 6.

The contract provided 30 days for Nine PBS to retrieve its data from OSS’ storage “upon termination of services.” But on March 6, OSS cut off the station’s access without warning, according to the complaint. When Nine PBS attempted to contact OSS to sort out the problem, it discovered that OSS’ website was defunct and the company had delinquency status with the Colorado Secretary of State.

To ensure the station’s data remained secure, Nine PBS investigated further and discovered that OSS had a relationship with Iron Mountain, according to the complaint.

Nine PBS sent a demand letter March 13, demanding that Iron Mountain preserve and return its data and offering “to pay any reasonable costs associated with its demand.” Iron Mountain neither confirmed nor denied the data was in its possession, the lawsuit states.

Nine PBS filed a lawsuit against OSS and its “purported” president Charles Wells in the St. Louis Circuit Court April 16, the complaint states. The broadcaster later paused the litigation after James Tramel, a “managing partner of the group that officially acquired” OSS’ assets, confirmed that Nine PBS’ data was secure within Iron Mountain’s Denver data center.

After communicating with Nine PBS for about a month, Tramel stopped responding. Weeks later, an automatic reply email from his account stated that he was no longer affiliated with OSS. Tramel revealed in a subsequent phone call that he “had been defrauded” into purchasing OSS, according to the complaint. At this point, the company’s previous owners, including Wells, Ben Nicholson, and Justine Ririe, resumed control of OSS’ operations.

After Nine PBS attempted to contact OSS leadership without success, the station returned to the St. Louis Circuit Court and obtained a default judgment against OSS. The court’s ruling stated that the station both owned its data and had an “immediate right to possess the data,” according to the complaint. The judgment also ordered OSS to return the data to Nine PBS “and/or facilitate its transfer to a new vendor.”

An attorney representing Nine PBS contacted Iron Mountain about returning the data, and noted that...