tedster - 2:29 am on Jan 7, 2013 (gmt 0)

Sorry it's been so long with no reply. My take on this (and my experience) is that Google does not want to see large amounts of text on many pages that is always the same. This makes the unique factors of the page hard to sort out.

The more you can focus on getting the unique content to "dominate" the source code, the easier you make Google's job. (I've never heard of any issue with duplicate images, by the way.)