Many people seems to worry about duplicate content, but I am not sure how applicable search engines decides which one is the duplicate? I am assuming (with the help of a simple common sense) oldest file date of same content counts as original and all others duplicates. Am I correct?
Basically, when Google finds a document (web page) it queries it's index to see if it's seen it before. If it has, that web page gets compared to other similar documents. Then based on a time/date stamp and the quality of in-bound links pointing to the documents, the one that weighs higher gets labled as the original content. Hope this helps.
RankSurge, Thanks for the info. What I understand from what you saying is that original publication date not alone a determining factor. For example, if a popular site such as BBC picks up and publishes an article (with the permission of the article creator - who's blog/website virtually unknown without any PR) then BBC's republished article will become the original one for Google???