StoutFiles - 6:03 pm on Nov 11, 2009 (gmt 0)

presumably google would cry foul and claim that the content is theirs... at the same time as arguing that the content does not belong to the papers. surely they can't argue both sides at once.

Surely they can, it's Google. They can do whatever they want. A clipping from Google News Terms of Use on what you cannot do below.

...use the Service to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales; take the results from the Service and reformat and display them, or use any robot, spider, other device or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service.