http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/credit-where-credit-is-due.html

QuoteNews publishers and readers both benefit when journalists get proper credit for their work. That can be difficult, with news spreading so quickly and many websites syndicating articles to others. That's why we're experimenting with two new metatags for Google News: syndication-source and original-source. Each of these metatags addresses a different scenario, but for both the aim is to allow publishers to take credit for their work and give credit to other journalists.

I'm sure they're thought around how easy it would be to spoof this? Come on. They're meta-tags.

this came out of their 'How do we shut the whinging journalists up' meeting?

I'm liking it though. Some feckwit (note to system; this is officially not a swearword) publisher a client uses has started insisting on canonical tags in all syndicated news pages to their original post. I will now beat him over the head with this until he agrees to use it instead.

I'm probably missing something here, but I don't see the incentive to use original-source

It only applies to G News anyway, official blog post here

http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/credit-where-credit-is-due.html

Explains it well enough

Quote from: Google
Although these metatags are already in use by our systems, you may not notice their impact right away. We'll need some time to observe their use "in the wild" before we can make the best use of them. But we're hopeful that this approach will help determine original authorship, and we encourage you to take advantage of them now.

not sure Google understand it, frankly.

Huh, I think they understand very well. For once, they can see the potential for abuse, and aren't just asserting that their solution is infallible, but that they want to test it in the real world and see what happens. I actually approve wholeheartedly.

This didn't take long...
How to spam the hell out of Google's new source attribution meta elements