Is duplicate content across different domains a problem?

[awaken]

I've been doing some research about duplicate content issues that face e-commerce websites. One of the sites that I've been studying is this one: www.example.com

I noticed that most of their product descriptions are either pulled directly from the [snip] website or from Yahoo's shopping directory. I figured that they would have trouble ranking some of their pages because of the duplicate content they use, however, it seems that they hardly have any trouble ranking. If you look at this page:
www.example.com/product

The product overview has been copied from the yahoo shopping site, but if you search for the keyword [snip], you'll notice that this company ranks very well for that term. So, I'm beginning to conclude that even though a site has blatantly copied a small portion of it's content directly from another, that they can still rank as long as the rest of the page is unique enough to prevent tripping Google's filter. By doing a search for the first sentence in the product description, I noticed that example.com isn't the only company using that description. Their are a ton of sites using the same exact content. When something circulates that much within a community, does Google assume it's content which can be shared thus placing less weight on it?

[edited by: pageoneresults at 10:09 pm (utc) on Nov. 19, 2007]
[edit reason] Removed Specifics - Please Refer to TOS [/edit]

[tedster]

When duplicate content occurs across more than one domain, then Google tries to filter out most of the duplicate urls, even down to only displaying one of the urls. This only makes sense for their end user, who doesn't want to have many links in the search results allgoing to the same information - no matter whether it's all on different domains or not.

However, this filtering is not a hard and fast rule. Sometimes another domain has enough "brownie points" or surrounding value for their version of that content to also show up in the search results.