Is duplicate content online really penalised by Google? If a website has multiple URLs pointing to the same content - is it really bad? If a website takes content from a partner website and and posts it- is it that bad? Also how can you get penalized?
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/deftly-dealing-with-duplicate-content.html http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/duplicate-content-due-to-scrapers.html http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359 http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/080609-101239
There is nothing like Google Penalty for duplicate content....but it is good to have unique content on your website.
If your making a website, its good to have unique content, if your writing articles you could probably get away with duplicate content. Because google will see duplicate content, you wont really get punished, just not indexed. Because, there is plenty of free content on certain sites that allow their articles to be republished. So do with it as you please.