roofuskit

They tend to have tamper alarms and since the company has a working relationship with the local PD I don't really want to be playing engineer with a device like that.

Yeah, take home the solar powered GPS device with a built in cellular connection. See how that goes.

I don't think most people realize that the most efficient process for scanning books involves disassembling them.

So of course they're upset to hear the books are disposed of afterwards.

What's their standing?

Edit: FYI in the United States we have a legal precedent called the first sale doctrine. Once you buy a book it is yours and you have the right to do what you want with it including selling it. And while they probably never anticipated a bunch of super wealthy narscisists buying a bunch of books so they could hoard the knowledge and then destroy them, we have no laws here that could prevent it.

This story has been posted multiple times and all over the internet. This is actually the shortest article I've seen about it.

The answer is lazy design. It was cheaper and easier to make it a dumb device that gets all direction from a server. Less complexity and more control on their end. Also, subscription.

Billionaires don't exist in a world where corporations have to financially pay for the harm they cause.

If their funding was 100% paid for by taxes, sure. But only a small fraction is actually paid for with public funds. They have to earn the rest to stay afloat.

Iron Mountain is aware of the situation so ideally they've flagged it to avoid the bad press of deleting it.

Iron Mountain is obviously aware of the situation and probably doesn't want the bad press of deleting it. PBS just needs the court order that makes them hand the data over. Because PBS isn't iron mountains client, they can't hand them the data without a court order.