Judge Sets Framework For Nine PBS to Retrieve 70 Years of Archival TV Data (current.org) 62
District Court Judge Eric Elliff has ordered Iron Mountain to cooperate with Nine PBS in recovering roughly 50TB of archival material stored through now-defunct vendor OSS. "He found that the station is the rightful owner of the materials and entitled to recover them from OSS' storage systems," reports Current.org. Nine PBS must identify a third party to help retrieve the files, pay outstanding storage fees, and ensure that data belonging to other OSS customers isn't disturbed or accidentally recovered. From the report: Under his order, Nine PBS is to identify a third-party vendor, such as a former OSS employee, who can assist in accessing and retrieving the data from the infrastructure that's housed in Iron Mountain's center within 30 days. Elliff acknowledged the complexities of Iron Mountain's position as a vendor to OSS, which, according to Nine PBS' complaint, is in delinquency. Iron Mountain is the "custodian" of Nine PBS' data, but it isn't the vendor that contracted with the station to store and preserve its data. That obligation remains with OSS. Under the order, Nine PBS will pay Iron Mountain current and past-due fees for data storage, starting from when OSS stopped paying Iron Mountain for use of its data storage facility.
During the hearing, Gregory Rich, an attorney representing Nine PBS, said the station seeks access to a physical cage where the data is housed within Iron Mountain's facility. The station is in contact with a former OSS employee who is willing to help obtain the data. The attorney noted that the data could potentially be stored in physical form, such as tapes that could be easily retrieved. But if the materials are on a server, Nine PBS could lose the materials forever if Iron Mountain shuts it down. William Cravens, the attorney representing Iron Mountain, told the judge his client doesn't know the format of Nine PBS' materials that were stored by OSS. He expressed concern about whether Nine PBS' archival material is lumped together with data from other OSS clients. Iron Mountain wants to avoid potentially corrupting the other data, Cravens added.
Elliff ordered the immediate return of any physical devices that hold Nine PBS' data once access to OSS' storage system is granted. If data retrieval turns out to be more complicated -- if it is encrypted, for example -- he will schedule another hearing to determine how to proceed. Once Nine PBS retrieves its data, the station must work with a third party to ensure that no data from other OSS customers is among those materials.
During the hearing, Gregory Rich, an attorney representing Nine PBS, said the station seeks access to a physical cage where the data is housed within Iron Mountain's facility. The station is in contact with a former OSS employee who is willing to help obtain the data. The attorney noted that the data could potentially be stored in physical form, such as tapes that could be easily retrieved. But if the materials are on a server, Nine PBS could lose the materials forever if Iron Mountain shuts it down. William Cravens, the attorney representing Iron Mountain, told the judge his client doesn't know the format of Nine PBS' materials that were stored by OSS. He expressed concern about whether Nine PBS' archival material is lumped together with data from other OSS clients. Iron Mountain wants to avoid potentially corrupting the other data, Cravens added.
Elliff ordered the immediate return of any physical devices that hold Nine PBS' data once access to OSS' storage system is granted. If data retrieval turns out to be more complicated -- if it is encrypted, for example -- he will schedule another hearing to determine how to proceed. Once Nine PBS retrieves its data, the station must work with a third party to ensure that no data from other OSS customers is among those materials.
will the former OSS employee be protected from bei (Score:4, Interesting)
will the former OSS employee be protected from being sued or facing some hacking charge?
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Re:will the former OSS employee be protected from (Score:5, Insightful)
The judge has already ruled that the data does not belong to OSS, it belongs to Nine PBS. The tech has no business or legal relationship in this to OSS or anyone involved with it, they are working for Nine PBS. So long as they act in good faith, I believe that will cover it.
Derived judicial immunity (Score:5, Informative)
granting of immunity by the judge, if that's even possible.
It's derived judicial immunity, the fact they're relying on a lawful order in good-faith protects them. As long as they stick to the terms of the order and don't overstep the bounds of the order then they are protected under the judge's own immunity as his or her agents.
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It's not company data. Even when OSS was operating it's not their data. A cloud provider does not have ownership of your data (though some, typically the free ones, grant themselves a license to sift through it). Do you get sued every time your OneDrive client syncs?
Re:will the former OSS employee be protected from (Score:5, Insightful)
OSS' founder and former CEO Eren Niazi should be personally liable for every single dollar and legal issue that arises from the mess he allowed to happen. We're not talking about IBM, this was a company with a whopping 51 employees at its peak. That's "first name basis" between everyone there.
And before the concern trolls join this party, I'm aware that's not how incorporation works in the US. And that in itself is unacceptable.
Re:will the former OSS employee be protected from (Score:4, Informative)
They're suppose to pay what they would otherwise have paid to OSS to store their data. So I think the only extra money they're out will be the legal fees. Which isn't nothing but I guess that's the cost of not doing proper and accessible backups.
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They're suppose to pay what they would otherwise have paid to OSS to store their data.
Not even that, I think. They're supposed to pay Iron Mountain what OSS would have paid them. One presumes there was some markup on it. Which should at least somewhat offset those legal fees.
(There's also whatever they're paying the former OSS employee for recovery services, which never come cheap.)
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Not even that, I think. They're supposed to pay Iron Mountain what OSS would have paid them. One presumes there was some markup on it. Which should at least somewhat offset those legal fees.
The problem here is that presumably Nine PBS has already paid OSS, who in turn was supposed to pay Iron Mountain, but didn't, and now Iron Mountain has locked things up. And now Nine PBS will have to pay a second time to get their data back.
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The bill was due in March, that's when Nine PBS discovered that OSS had folded.
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Re:will the former OSS employee be protected from (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure they're much happier with this outcome than most of the likely alternatives, but it's unconscionable a non-profit entity is going to pay $$$$ just to get back their own data from a company in breach of contact - A contract explicitly to safely store Nine PBS' data.
If I'm reading this right, OSS doesn't exist any more. So Nine PBS isn't paying them anything, they're paying for data recovery services. Unfortunately that they need to, but that's what happens when companies go bankrup.
OSS' founder and former CEO Eren Niazi should be personally liable for every single dollar and legal issue that arises from the mess he allowed to happen. We're not talking about IBM, this was a company with a whopping 51 employees at its peak. That's "first name basis" between everyone there.
And before the concern trolls join this party, I'm aware that's not how incorporation works in the US. And that in itself is unacceptable.
Sucks to be you, son. The modern world could not possibly exist without corporations as they exist now. Don't like the corporate shield? Walk everywhere, because automobile companies and the petrochemical companies cannot exist without it. Grow your own food, because the entire agricultural industry and the trucking industry that brings good to your local supermarket cannot exist without it. Grow your own cotton and weave your own clothes, or go naked, because that's another industry that can't exist without it.
Our current civilization cannot exist without it.
And you know it, you just like to masturbate over hurting people who are more successful than you are.
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The modern world could not possibly exist without corporations as they exist now.
Complete bullshit. Anything a corporation can do can be done more efficiently by a co-op of co-ops.
And you know it, you just like to masturbate
You're a jerkoff all day every day.
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Re: will the former OSS employee be protected from (Score:2)
You forgot greed existed again. How many major head injuries HAVE you had?
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You don't think greedy people can form a co-op?
You don't know co-ops are incorporated?
You didn't know that profit-minded investors could invest in co-ops?
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Did you masturbate at what a manly man you aren't while you typed that with your other hand?
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Because Skippy is a moron, which you would know if you noticed who you were replying to.
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Apparently, the one who needs help is you, letting a retarded troll live in your head rent free, and believing that you could do anything other than feed its delusions. Assuming your not one of its sock puppets.
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You can't blame Nine PBS for their data handling partner to go belly up
Actually we can and we do. You need to plan for contingencies. If you've got an asset that's vital for your business and want to store it with someone else, you need to figure out up front what you're going to do if they disappear, or damage the asset, etc. If the Nine PBS management didn't do this then they should be canned.
Similarly, if you put your money in a bank, you need to know what will happen if that bank fails. In many places, there is government-backed insurance for exactly that. If that did
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Sure, I'll pay you $200 annually to map out and implement a DR plan with 3-2-1 backups and a contracted third party on the hook to go through the runbook when the earthquake hits.
It's not practical for us to try to solution here but a contingency backup of 50 TB of digital assets might be as simple as making a second copy and dumping it onto media in a box somewhere. It's an archive not a live system. Or whatever. Point is, it's not that hard to have *something* beyond just blind faith that a vendor will keep their end of the bargain.
Other non-technical contingency plans would include making sure the contracts have provisions for this common-enough scenario so you don't have to l
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If this was indeed an "offsite backup" then 9PBS can just access ( and back up ) their normal local data and do not need to access Iron Mountain's machines.
But it sounds like this was not a backup, but their main data store.
If so, that is unforgiveable incompetence and heads should roll.
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Likewise, it is quite possible that all access was routed through OSS and PBS9 never had a way to do it directly.
It looks like they got taken by a scam artist. This Niazi guy has a really bad track record.
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"Personally liable?"
Good luck with that, you sweet, summer child.
Incorporation is why he isn't "personally liable."
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You're both right. He should be personally liable, and incorporation is why he probably isn't, because corporations are first and foremost legal vehicles for separating profit from responsibility. They are specifically designed to enable bad people to profit from investing in bad things. In this case, specifically fraud, where they promise to provide services when they know they will not be able to provide those services.
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It's unconscionable that a non-profit entity with a CTO making nearly $180k / year failed to plan for this. He needs to be fired right now. Having only a single copy of your data, managed by someone else? Further, when Nine PBS went to renew their contract with OSS and failed to get a response -- for over a month -- knowing that they would lose access to their data if the contract was not renewed, he chose to do nothing instead of instantly start downloading all of the data, still having access to the d
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One thing that breaks a corporation's liability limitation is fraud, and it looks like Niazi managed to skate on those charges with an insanity defense. From what I've found, he has been committing fraud for decades. Ripping off investors, family, retired football players... He claims to be responsible for Fa
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The article says, "He also ordered Nine PBS to defend and indemnify Iron Mountain should other data be corrupted in the process of retrieving its archival materials."
So the answer to your question appears to be yes.
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will the former OSS employee be protected from being sued or facing some hacking charge?
What hacking charge? OSS was the vendor. You can't hack your own data especially when a judge requires you to access it. Two scenarios: Did you come up with some amazing big brain edge case here or did you not apply any thought to your post at all?
When you find out (Score:5, Informative)
This is what happens when you find out the "the cloud" is someone's computer, but not yours, and maybe not the person you pay either. How did that Easy button work out?
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The cloud is perfectly reasonable as the "1" in a "3-2-1" strategy.
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When you find out that the $4500 you would have spent for a brand new 8-bay NAS plus 8 pieces of 8TB HDD (at today's absurdly high prices, would have been like half that two years ago) is far less than a years' worth of data storage charges, and absolutely peanuts compared to the legal fees, court costs, third party specialists, and on and on and on.
Zero excuse not to have several local copies of such a small amount of data - especially today, when you can buy single drives with 26TB of storage.
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I can understand using cloud storage for ease of use, but it's unacceptable that they didn't at least have a cold storage backup plan. 50TB is a laughably trivial amount of data for an organization like this.
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So, it looks like their li
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This is what happens when you find out the "the cloud" is someone's computer, but not yours, and maybe not the person you pay either.
Is it? I mean millions of people around the world use "the cloud" as someone else's computer and don't have this problem. There's nothing inevitable about this, in fact what happened here was rare enough that (and this is true) it got reported on by the media.
Everyone knows that the cloud is "someone else's computer" but for most people that someone else is usually better at managing computers. Dataloss, and access outages weren't invented by the cloud, in fact it's probably significantly minimised them. Yo
They should also recruit slashdot readers (Score:5, Funny)
The lesson is simple. (Score:3)
Back your shit up.
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They did back it up.
They forgot the other part: Keep the original.
Or to put it another way: Have two copies that are extremely unlikely* to be erased/rendered useless by the same event or series of events.
*if a planet-killing asteroid hits, well....
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They did back it up.
They forgot the other part: Keep the original.
In other words, they didn't back it up. They just stored it offsite.
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Yeah. Pretty soon (if not already) the latest SD card standard will hold this.
Just don't drop that microSD card in your shag rug.
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Everything dies. That's why you need an encoding scheme with error correction. And then you copy it to new media long before errors accumulate and become unrecoverable.
The decline of competence (Score:2)
Being so utterly tech-ignorant in 2026 should be shameful, but the adult choice to be incompetent is completely normalized.
The death of competence was inevitable because the majority of humanity are not intelligent and intelligence is not a choice.
People don't know what right looks like, and PBS is a bastion of old people who should be removed from the levers of power because they're unable to learn.
Piss-poor writeup needs more info... (Score:2)
I know that journalism is dead and it's been apparent for some time that the inverse pyramid isn't taught anymore. But who the hell are/were OSS, besides a "now-defunct vendor" for PBS? And what was their relationship with Iron Mountain that this judge is blaming and punishing the latter for the former's... wrongdoing? WAS there any actual wrongdoing? Or were they just a business that failed?
Oh... posted by BeauHD. So of course the whole thing is garbage.
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The judge isn't punishing Iron Mountain. Iron Mountain has been in contact with Nine PBS, but they said from their perspective the data belongs to OSS (their customer) and they would need a court order.
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I feel their pain (Score:2)
For a number of years, I used a UK-based Subversion host to manage a software project. The company went bankrupt and I lost all access to the server. So the entire change history was gone. At least I have the current version locally.
Heads at Nine PBS need to roll as well (Score:3)
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Now, where they fell down wasn't in worrying about what would happen to their cold storage, it was in vetting the vendor. They should have noticed
They forgot one item (Score:2)