pageoneresults - 9:21 pm on Jun 20, 2006 (gmt 0)

I doubt that you will be penalized for that. However, Google might just ignore the same articles on your site.

Here's the way I see it working in most instances. You publish an article. That article gets indexed. Then someone else publishes your article. That one gets indexed too. Now it will come down to who has the most "power" to start with.

But, after a while, the originator of the article usually picks up a natural progression of backlinks which the copied articles do not. So, over time, your article should trump the copies.