Back in February our company was featured in the LA Times tech blog. That same exact article must have went out on syndication 10 times, each time crediting the original tech writer David Sarno. However each article appeared in search results. Google is pretty tough(supposedly) on duplicate content. My question is probably unanswerable. Too many factors to determine what is legit, how can they 'really' determine if you jacked someone else content or if you just quoted a block of text to expand on someones opinion. Is it all in the credibility of the domain? Or is Google's spider smart enough to recognize the credit to the original author. Do tell DP
This may answer a few of your questions. google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359
Google do not penalize websites for duplicate content, read this thread I started not long ago... http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1380838