Questions re: duplicate pages and banner exchanges

What about syndicating content?

[Ceverett]

We have a program where we pay affiliates to link to a
customized search page which takes our content and makes
it look like it belongs on their website. Basically,
our site is database driven, so we just drop our content
into templates that make it look like the content comes
from their site, complete with links, however this is on
our server. The idea is that the user in effect never
leaves our affiliates site, which makes it more palatable
for the affiliates.

Also, we run a banner exchange (I did the programming for
it myself, all the free banner exchange scripts pretty well
suck) on the same server, each banner has an associated
link to to the banner exchange home page. The banner
exchange has a PR7 w/ 1400+ backlinks and shows up 1#
out of 150K pages for "banner exchange" preceded by a
keyword for the industry we serve (I did it right by accident,
so I take no credit). I run 2 links from a PR6 page on the
banner exchange site to our site. Of course, we have the
banner exchange on our site.

Are either of these an issue for google?

[vitaplease]

1. I think there are more sites doing this without penalty. Also, although not directly link-fed, many news sites do a direct copy of for example Reuteres news feeds without penalty.

2. I see nothing wrong with all the banner backlinks. Google does something similar with all the "powered by google" links back to Google.