You actually don't need all that much authority to get away with ranking scraped content in Google. Despite their FUD, Google's duplicate content detection algorithm seems to be largely non-existent.<p>For example, check out the Google results for <a href="http://hackerne.ws" rel="nofollow">http://hackerne.ws</a>, which is a page-for-page duplicate of news.ycombinator:<p><a href="http://www.google.com/q=site%3Ahackerne.ws" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/q=site%3Ahackerne.ws</a><p>10,000 pages indexed, not a single word of original content.<p>Note: I know hackerne.ws is not trying to be spammy, and merely parked the domain improperly. If the owner is reading, all it would take is a simple 301 redirect to fix.