This warning should sound familiar, except this time it's coming from the lips of the venerated Valleywag blog instead of mine. Maybe now you'll listen!

"Marissa Mayer, the Google executive who runs all the parts of the search engine, just put her legal team in a pickle. She told conference-goers yesterday at Fortune's Brainstorm conference that Google News, despite being advertising-free, makes $100 million in revenues a year . . . The real reason why Google doesn't put ads on Google News. That's because it fears lawsuits from the media organizations whose headlines and text it picks up and republishes. (It's already lost a court case brought by a newspaper group in Belgium). By not running ads on Google News, Google lawyers could argue it's not profiting from their work. Mayer just shot a $100 million hole in that argument. When she puts a number on how much money Google News makes for her employer, she gives newspapers' lawyers a big, fat, juicy reason to demand a cut of the business."

The first time I mentioned this was more than a year ago, after the Tribune's Sam Zell said Google was stealing his content. I agreed. And then I laid out exactly the case to be made in courts. As recently as a couple weeks ago, I pointed out that Marissa Mayer is going around admitting that Google News is making money.

As profits shrink and newspapers look for a scapegoat, someone is going to sue that woman. Maybe it'll be Sam.