Wait, who?

…skeptics of climate change have filed requests for Mann’s emails under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act. (Mann is an influential climatologist whose work has bolstered the case for man-made global warming.) So far, they have lost. And they have lost so badly that media organizations have sat up, taken notice — and filed a brief in the case.
The Virginia Supreme Court is weighing whether a professor’s emails are, as a Prince William County circuit court ruled, “proprietary” and therefore exempt from the state’s FOIA. The lower court ruled that proprietary records are those “owned or in possession of one who manages and controls them.” This has alarmed the media organizations, including the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the AP, the Newspaper Association of America, Reuters, Atlantic Media and several others.
The media groups note that the lower court’s ruling “literally writes into the exemption the very definition of a public record in Virginia. … Under the lower court’s definition, no public university record would qualify for release under VFOIA because all university documents are presumably ‘things’ and would be ‘owned or in the possession of’ the university.”

(Emphasis mine.)