And if you get any news from bbc.co.uk or read British bloggers you'll get accustomed to sports teams and corporations being considered plural. e.g.: "Apple today are releasing..."

Well it's accurate, a corporation isn't an individual and when you're dealing with big business it is always controlled by multiple people so any decision is decided by a group.

Actually a corporation is, legally, an individual.

Unless I'm mistaken, that absurd notion is only entertained in the US.

Nope. I am British and used to be a journalist. The first place I worked had a very large sign on the wall:

"Companies are singular".

Which indeed they are, although staffed by multiple individuals.

It also works like that in the Netherlands.

Which is strange, because the whole concept behind the British invention of the "corporation" is to address a group of people as a singular entity.

Not quite -- the underlying concept is a "company" in the sense of a troupe, band, eg "The King's Men", the "Dorrit's Chalk-Weavers", "Harold & Sons".

The idea of a "corporate person" is much more recent, like 1880's, and I think started in the US.

No, you're wrong. The concept of corporate singularity started in the 1600s in England.

From wikipedia:

In the late seventeenth century, Stewart Kyd, the author of the first treatise on corporate law in English, defined a corporation as,

"a collection of many individuals united into one body, under a special denomination, having perpetual succession under an artificial form, and vested, by policy of the law, with the capacity of acting, in several respects, as an individual, particularly of taking and granting property..."

actually, it started in Holland with the V.O.C.

I said that it started in the 1600s in England, not that they invented it.

And don't be facetious, everyone knows the Dutch were very innovative during the slave trade.