Totally misleading...
The Author of this article obviously doesn't have a full understanding of what is going on with the whole Google debacale. I totally agree with job514 and several other commenters.
"that Google's Univerisal Search setup is unfairly promoting the company's own services – including Google Maps, YouTube, and Google Product Search – over those of its competitors."
If I ran a store (say Acme Computers) and was selling MS-based PCs. Would I be required, by law or otherwise, to recommend or refer my customers to Cheap Computers down the street, merely because they came to me (the largest and most well-known retailer in the area) first? Even if their prices were lower, better quality, etc? The first result on Google shouldn't be Bing's results for what I'm looking for. The first page of Google results shouldn't be a list of scraping websites' results for what I'm looking for. It would be like having your first page of results be links to Scroogles' results for what I'm looking for... (think about that recursion algorithm for a bit!).
"de-indexed because about 87 per cent was "copied" from elsewhere."
This is blately evident (the remaining 13% is likely ads), and can be summed up with another sentence from the article: "other copied content can be very useful indeed. Foundem does copy a majority of its content, but it's a search engine," which takes us back to argument #1: don't index the result page of other search engines.
A bit of a note toward Bing's theft of index results: They aren't necessarily stealing the result and indexing it in their engine. The site was already indexed. They're merely using Google's engine ranking as an additional (albeit heavy) weight to determine it's ranking on Bing. This is an underhanded way to hide the fact that one's search ranking algorithms are crap compared to the targeted competitor. So no, their not stealing results nor indexes, their stealing the index RANKING, at which point, they might as well just be another Scroogle.