I have heard a lot about the duplicate content penalty crap by Google. In all fairness if you look at Google how much content does it display on its homepage nil. It displays others content. So it has no right to ban any one for copied content or illegal content.
http://www.jonathanleger.com/who-says-you-cant-rank-duplicate-content/ Relevancy, on-page optimization and off-page SEO are what are important.