The ruling seems fair and reasonable, and I'm surprised they couldn't come to the same conclusion without a court.

Sometimes these things can go better for companies like Iron Mountain when there's a court order/decision in place to cover them. Nine PBS, in order to access their own data, could end up accessing data belonging to other people and that may not be properly covered under existing contracts and policies. It's a risk for Iron Mountain if this happens. Having a court decision and court set procedures that essentially force them to participate and also establishes third party review of the data will give them some cover if one of those other clients of the now defunct OSS discovers that Nine PBS accessed or inadvertently retained their data.

A court is needed for cover since it is possible that sometimes else's data will be seen or even corrupted in the process. This way they can say they were doing what the court asked for. That is legal cover for everyone to do what they want. Also legal limits on what they can do.

That is how I interpret the article anyway

They couldn't really - I doubt Iron Mountain actually objected to giving the data, but in the end it probably wasn't in a position to know what data belonged to PBS and what belonged to other clients of OSS and you'd get very worried if a data storage company gave a companies data to someone else without authorisation.

It’s likely that Iron Mountain needed a court order in order to do this with legal cover.

It’s just a data warehouse and OSS likely had multiple clients data and backups. Iron Mountain can’t let one third party go searching through a defunct customers stuff that has a bunch of additional third parties property intermingled with it. Too many unknowns and potentially litigious third parties.