A PBS member station in Missouri is suing a data storage center after a cloud-based solution went offline earlier this year, leaving the broadcaster unable to access more than five decades worth of archive video footage.
The lawsuit was filed in late January by the operators of KETC (Channel 9), which goes by the name Nine PBS. The case is being heard in Denver because the cloud storage provider, Open Source Storage, used servers located at a Colorado facility owned by Iron Mountain Data Centers.
The video files appear to be safe, but KETC says Iron Mountain has refused to return the data because the physical infrastructure inside its data center is owned by Open Source Storage.
The station requested temporary and preliminary relief to prevent Iron Mountain from deleting, modifying or overwriting the data while the dispute proceeds. A district judge granted the request and set a hearing for this week.
KETC Vice President and Chief Content Officer Leah Freeman confirmed the lawsuit in a statement to the website Current, which first broke the story this week.
“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,” Freeman said.
Freeman said the materials span more than 70 years of the station’s history. According to the lawsuit, the blocked data includes archival coverage of East St. Louis, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Great Flood of 1993.
KETC entered into a relationship with a company described in the complaint as OSS’ predecessor in 2019. That vendor provided hardware, software and cloud-storage services for the station’s archival materials and other data. KETC renewed its contracts with that vendor and later OSS on an annual basis.
The station says it attempted to schedule a meeting with OSS in February to discuss renewal for 2026 but received no response. The agreement was set to expire March 6 and provided 30 days for KETC to retrieve its data after termination. Instead, KETC says OSS cut off access without warning on the expiration date.
The station later discovered OSS’ website was defunct and that the company was delinquent with the Colorado Secretary of State.
KETC first sued OSS and its purported president, Charles Wells, in St. Louis Circuit Court in April. The station later paused that case after a person involved with acquiring OSS assets confirmed the data was secure at Iron Mountain’s Denver data center, according to the complaint. After additional communications broke down, KETC obtained a default judgment against OSS.
The Missouri court found that KETC owned the data and had an immediate right to possess it, according to the Denver complaint. The judgment ordered OSS to return the data or facilitate its transfer to a new vendor.
KETC says Iron Mountain eventually acknowledged it had the data but later refused to return it, citing OSS’ ownership of the infrastructure. The station says it “had no choice but to file this lawsuit” to force Iron Mountain to protect and provide the materials.
Iron Mountain has not publicly spoken about the incident.
