A big question for web-writers is, how much do we have to change content to prevent dupe content penalties?

Plagiarism and copyright laws aside, we don't want to copy/paste other people's content because Google won't give us credit for those pages.

New writers have often asked if they couldn't just save time and copy/paste material from other sites, and then just change some of the words around?

I've never been able to offer any more concrete answer than this one: Whether or not the search engines can recognize such rip-offs now, they will probably be pretty good at it sooner or later. Latent symantic indexing (dunno much about it) already recognizes the relationships between words, and even within synonym relationships. So my point has always been: Let's not chance it.

But I'd really like to know if anyone has more input on this.