Was just wondering, the number of times the content is duplicated makes a difference or simply any content that has even 1 duplicate gets treated as a content with 1000 duplicates?
Generally, copied content means same words, same sentences, same manner or paragraph, same format etc. If you have many pages this type of content, all the pages will not be ignored in SERPs. If we check a article submitted in many different article directories, would be same. But all the articles got ranked. But you should care about it that content should not be more than two or three times on the different sites, and only one time should be on self site.
Assuming you're talking about entire pages rather than snippets of content, the search engines will pick one page and discard/ignore the rest. If you're talking about a small snippet of content being duplicated on your page (such as a top news stories feed) while the rest of the page has original content, then you'll be fine.
Duplicate content is never considered good from seo point of view. At so many places, it is restricted. Only fresh content draws the attention of search engine crawlers. it gives preference to fresh content only.