The headline is factually inaccurate. It looks like a mistake that he was denied access to Adwords due to original content, but that has no connection to his ranking in search. It looks like the adwords representative may not have access to fine-grained enough tools to assess the site accurately, which is an organizational failing, but there's no bad intent there. In some sense it reflects how disconnected search and ads are from each other that they're using crude tools to assess original content.

Google cares a great deal about putting the original source of a piece of content first. If we're doing that incorrectly, it's because we screwed up, not because that's how things are designed. It's a hard problem and an area we are still working on intensely. It would be great if someone involved could post the queries on which we are screwing up so we can debug what's causing it.