If you are using duplicate content, a quick tip that might help your content appear more legit would be to use a piece of flash somewhere on the page, maybe a video or something.

Penalization rules tend to bend when the page has flash on it. ie. turn off flash and look at a youtube video page and observe how spammy the content and the content structure looks to a search engine. Then imagine taking all the text content on that page and putting it on a page by itself, would it get banned? In most cases i’d say it wouldn’t last a week no matter how many links the page had.

On sites with a lot of duplicate content, I actually use (abuse) Google’s content to make them like me.  Use youtube videos, picasa / flickr images, etc…  Somehow, the search engines take these as a “goodie” and will give a bit more leeway to pages using their assets.