Jerry:

The issue of duplicate content may be put to bed, but it’s not for the reasons [or general understanding] expressed in the cited thread.

Duplicate content penalties are typically levied [by Google] against sites that publish a predominance of identical content on two separate domains. This is a far different issue where copies of documents are published in different locations.

Google treats each of these issues separately. In cases of domains that are predominantly identical, there is a clear intent to game the search rankings for one or more domains.

In cases that involve copies of documents (i.e., pages) that are spread across the web and on many domains, Google makes a good faith effort to determine the authoritative address of the document. Google is very effective at figuring this out, and it rewards the version that it finds is the most likely to be the original.

While using and re-purposing copies of documents is not necessarily risky, it’s also not an ideal practice. References to the authoritative document with some added observational value is a far better practice than making copies. However, as folks in the cited forum indicate, they have been able to rank well in some instances involving near-verbatim copies of information.

–bf