In fact, even in 2013, Googles’ head of webspam Matt Cutts has had to discuss the issue in several of his regular Webmaster Help videos because people keep asking questions and looking for clarification.
Back in the summer, Cutts talked about duplicate content with regards to disclaimers and Terms and Conditions pages.
“The answer is, I wouldn’t stress about this unless the content that you have is duplicated as spammy or keyword stuffing or something like that, you know, then we might be – an algorithm or a person might take action on – but if it’s legal boiler plate that’s sort of required to be there, we might, at most, might not want to count that, but it’s probably not going to cause you a big issue,” Cutts said at the time.
“We do understand that lots of different places across the web do need to have various disclaimers, legal information, terms and conditions, that sort of stuff, and so it’s the sort of thing where if we were to not rank that stuff well, then that would probably hurt our overall search quality, so I wouldn’t stress about it,” he said.