1) If you copy/paste Press Releases on your website, wouldnt that be duping from other websites and your website might get banned? ALSO 2) If you copy/paste a couple paragraphs from a website and put a link directing to the source, can GOOGLE ban you because you COPIED just some of their information!?
Not likley, but it may not give your site full credit for the information and the content as if it was original. I would recommend going over and rewriting the content, so you will see full benefit from the content.
Duplicate content penalty only means you don't get credit for the content. There are many legitimate reasons why content would need to be copied exactly, think about syndicated news stories or RSS feeds. As always, there are many rumors swirling around on the subject. Google is upfront about many of their policies. I suggest checking the archives of Matt Cutt's blog.
Copying a few press releases or some paragraphs won't hurt you, especially if you give credit to the original source. If Google really was uptight about any kind of duplicate content, every press release and article directory would be penalized or banned by Google.
If you copy others stuff in your site, and even if you put a link back to the original content, the main problem with duplicate content is that, google will not send traffic to those duplicate pages. So if you want to improve your site's rank or to get more traffic from SEs, then duplicate content will not help. If google finds lot of duplicate content in your site, then your site may be penalized and your site will drop badly in SERPs.
Google won't ban you unless you copy entire articles several times and reproduce them multiple times on your site.
Duplicate content is a fact of life. You may not rank well for it, but it won't get you banned. Just do a search on google for George Washington's farewell address. They would have to ban a lot of sites if dupe content was bad.
it will penalize you for duplicate content and your site will never appear in rankings (unless you remove duplicate content)