Anyway, yes, that is called "duplicate penalty"

Your pages might rank worst if their content is duplicated on another site.

This is not necessarily bad: if your site has little or no traffic from search engines and the traffic from the "other" site is good, the balance could be positive.

Plus, if the "other" site is strong (pagerank etc.) you could have:
1) the contents of www.yourdomain.com/little_page.html are copied on www.otherdomain.com/article.html

2) www.otherdomain.com/article.html get a good page rank

3) you get a link from www.otherdomain.com/article.html to another page (for example, your home page: www.yourdomain.com ) and your site's page rank gets better...

Methinks it needs your site to be an authority in the first place and second is to give Google heads up.

I was contacted once by a major player who wanted to license my content, I contacted Google, and they replied that I would not suffer dupe penalty if we did it.

YMMV

and yes, what does this have to do with AsSense?
(there's the flame you asked for)