Avoiding duplicate content troubles when reprinting articles

Do multiple sources still cause trouble?

[fred_bloggs]

I have an information site that shows rss.
The rest of the content will be duplicated from copyrighted articles.
I have permission to re-use these but will a simple cut and paste job get me into trouble with the search engines, even though each page will consist of multiple articles plus the rss.

If this is not possible, then I plan to rewrite them.
This is o.k. with the copyright holders, as long as I credit them.

Do I need to bother?

If so, then what degree of adaptation is neccessary to avoid penalties?

Thanks

[fairguy]

I write my own articles on daily basis and submit them to ezines. I do not submit to only one ezine but multiple number of ezines. So I would be the one that actually created a duplicate content for those ezines. Also all of the ezines provide rss feeds which many webmasters can implement into their site.

From my perspective all I care is if a particular web-site has my info on it. I had few people re-writing my articles, to avoid duplicate content, and those re-writers were really close to my original article, so in many cases I had to file DMCA complaints with google. I was able to remove majority of the articles with DMCA, there were some that were really good rewrites.

So my suggestion is if you know how to rewrite than go for it. Just make sure those re-writes will sound different.

[fred_bloggs]

If those ezines were all publishing the same articles, and getting away with it, does that mean google only considers it dupe content if it is not the only content on that page?
If so all my troubles are over.

Could someone please clarify, what is considered duplicate content.
I can't seem to find out on the google site.

Thanks.

[tedster]

It's hard to clarify the topic, because duplicate content filtering is complex business. It's a lot more than a simple set of rules or percentages. To get some idea, check out this recent thread:

Google's New Patent (duplicate content detection) - Methods and apparatus for estimating similarity [webmasterworld.com]