Question regarding duplicate content

[josh_ervin]

Let me see if I can get someone to clear something up for me regarding duplicate content. If I were to find some public domain content online someplace like from a U.S government website and decide I want to use the content in question on a website I'm producing I could be wasting my time because SEs could ban or not list the site because it has the same content as another site? Is this correct?

Thanks,

Josh

[Mike]

At the moment there is no evidence that search engines do ban duplicate content sites...

[josh_ervin]

Thanks Mike.

[nohaber]

There's no ban for dup docs. There is ban for duplicate sites.
Thing is, Google filters out dup docs that match a query and show only the oldest/highest PR one. That way users don't get the same results. It means you won't get SE traffic to the dup pages.