it sounds like Iron Mountain specifically markets itself as "we will never turn over your data without a court order", so whether contractually obligated to do that or not, choosing to do that when they have a legal choice to do so is part of what attracts and keeps customers, and not choosing to do voluntarily would harm their business and lose them customers. Perhaps they could legally choose to turn over the data, but they choosing not to. A court order would give them no legal choice, and they would then turn over the data, and it would not harm their attraction or retention of customers, because that was always the deal, only with a court order.

The electricity company doesn’t have a contract that says they’ll only give electricity to specific people.

Iron Mountain just doesn’t want to be in the middle, and I can see why. OSS went defunct, PBS files a lawsuit, guy buys OSS so PBS pauses, guy now claims he was defrauded into buying it, and somewhere in the middle nobody from OSS showed up in court so there’s a default judgement to turn those over.

I would probably also refuse to turn over the documents without a court order. The whole situation is a mess and the only way to be absolutely sure you aren’t going to get dragged into it is a court order for specific performance.

PBS probably isn’t going to sue them for releasing the docs, but who knows what OSS will do. It doesn’t sound like anyone even really knows who owns OSS at the moment.

Those two entities don't need to do something that they wouldn't normally do for that order to get carried out. It's an extraordinary act for a colocation facility to release hardware or data to someone they have no relationship with. Iron Mountain has no relationship to or with Nine PBS, only with OSS

I'm sure Iron Mountain will be happy to turn over the data, but to cover their ass in terms of their agreement with OSS, they need the cover of a court order otherwise they would likely be in breach of their contract with OSS

Pretty sure a court order to return say a "PlayStation Dev kit" a game studio employee had when he got fired during covid remote work mandates, if it's just against the employee personally, would not obligate me to let you in or carry it out to you if that employee left it on the middle shelf of my couch table having told me he'll be back after, say, taking unpaid and non-granted-despite-requested time off for his "common law wife if that was a thing in the state they're in, but legally just unrelated consenting adults (that haven't yet moved in together)" 's funeral and rounding it up to one whole week to grieve at their memorable places, after having crashed at my place (bringing his work with him, thus the dev kit on my table-shelf) as I live much closer to the hospital his "wife" was in for the past 3 weeks and he expressed some psychological worries about spending almost all of his time alone while the love of his life is dying....

In fact, I'd expect you to need a seizure-warrant/distinctly-named-but-to-the-layperson-identical-court-order for my place as, among other things, I don't think I am in a position to legally have standing to challenge an order that's not mentioning me, and lack of me being an active flight risk would probably preclude you from arguing exigent circumstances to secure the dev kit without a judge ordering me to let you.

TL;DR: "complying" with a court order that's filed against a 3rd party is, IMO/AFAIK, a voluntary act, specifically because the party not mentioned in the court order AFAIK has no legal standing to challenge that very order of in court. _Precisely_ because they're not legally mandated to comply, at least not beyond perhaps taking a precautionary legal hold on the referenced information to not get accused of aiding in destruction of data in case the court-ordered party directs the non-mentioned party to delete through the regular customer relationship channels (API? Whatever else?).