Not really. Iff the newspaper allowed it in its robots.txt, Google would copy the page title and a short description of the page. This is the same thing every search engine does with every page on the Internet. Google did not copy the actual articles and sell ads next to them. The newspapers' Web teams even knew their publishers were talking crap, which is why they didn't just delist themselves and stop complaining about it.

(Full disclosure: I work on newspaper sites. I was actually one of the people who had to have the "Well, we could opt out" "BUT THEN WE'D LOSE ALL OUR TRAFFIC!" conversation.)