Clearly, Google does not penalize trusted sites for having duplicate content. In almost all cases, your Penalty in Google is NOT because you have duplicate content. 99.9% of the time, the problem is somewhere else.
The way that duplicate content can hurt you would be if you have multiple copies of the same story on your website. You will not get a “penalty” from Google but you will dilute both your internal link juice and could potentially split any natural inbound links (and therefore ranking power) among all the copies of the page. This type of dilution could take an item that would have ranked and banish it to obscurity.
The same applies for spam sites. Unless your site is screaming “I AM A SPAM SITE”, the duplicate content penalty is not gonna hit. And since you would have gotten hit anyway by that human reviewer that just marked your site (and Network, if you weren’t careful) as spam, we can safely say that there is no official Duplicate Content Penalty at Google.