I am 100% sure that they do if they catch it. Their policy guidlines say this about what they consider unwanted. "Multiple sites offering the same content"
A site can be banned only if the duplicate content is on the site. I mean more pages with the same text. Google drops the hammer on sites with many indentical pages. If you have on your site a few articles founded on other sites or article directories you will not be banned, but if 90% of your site is composed by articles from other sites the serach engine can penalize you and drop your rankings. In addition, search engines know when an article comes for the first time on the web and, after a few weeks, they remove from their index all the copies of the article, but not the original article. That means if you search for the title of an article you will not found too many results, even if the article was copied of hundreds of websites. Last word, sorry for my bad english but I'm italian and I'm still learning. Best Regards
IMO, press release content is treated differently than other content. Press release content won't invoke a penalty with the sophisticated algos out there, me thinks, because the algo programmers know that this type of content is legally duplicated to many sites. As always, IMO.
Google has a duplicate content filter. You won't get banned but you won't show for any high competition keywords.
I have many competitors with duplicate content for my no1 site, I don't see any changes. Can I complian to yahoo as my content is been on my site for almost 3 years and now this geek has copied it all. I tried to contact him but didn't get any response.
If duplicate content cause a site to be banned or penalized, I guess the first site to be banned is goarticles.com, ezinearticles.com, ang articlecity.com and all article directory sites. Same with those dmoz clones they are using the same data if I am not mistaken but still they are getting good traffic from the 3 major SE.
Those sites won't get penalized because their content is legit. People submit articles to those site with full knowledge that they are going to be reproduced on other sites. The search engine folks know how those sites work too.
If it's a case of pure copy and paste BS, then you should definitely contact the 3 major search engines about it.
I don't know about getting banned! but certainly a penalty. I had a site where I moved all pages to the root location out of subdirectorys. I didn't delete or redirect the original pages/urls and google saw the duplicated pages and moved them to the supplemental index.
You can use copyscape as proof and contact the competitor who copied you. Tell them it is a violation the copyright and they need to remove it.