Is there a clear line separating Duplicate Content from Consistent Branding?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions G+ community.

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  Gabriel Kanes: Is there a clear line separating Duplicate Content from Consistent Branding? If the top 20% of every page of my site is identical, containing a company logo, phone graphic, email graphic, & contact info, would that be frowned on? Obviously a lot of sites do this or similar, but are there right and wrong ways to implement it?
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  Steve Kilbride: No.  ;Graphics aren't generally considered to be text content (because they're not text).  ;Duplicate content refers to text primarily.  ;And Google knows about these kinds of thing... including common footers you see at the bottom of the page.
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  Greg Baka: Every site has some "duplicate content" (lower case because it is not important) due to headers, footers, product descriptions that ; vary only in color, etc. ; The kind of DUPLICATE CONTENT (upper case to show danger) to avoid is copying content from other websites. So , just don't copy chunks of text from other people's sites and call them your own. And if you write some really good stuff, you should check occasionally with Copyscape.com to make sure nobody else is copying your stuff.
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  Gabriel Kanes: Thanks
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  Edwin Jonk: That is called boilerplate content. This is normal and most sites have boilerplate. Search engines can handle the boilerplate these days pretty well. However there are always corner cases. For example when the boilerplate is so large that people have to scroll down to see the main content it might be frowned about. In general, it is normal.
  
  To make it a little bit easier for robots to identify boilerplate you use semantics like in HTML5 <header> or the role element (role="complementary" role="navigation")
  
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  Gabriel Kanes: Thanks for the link, that's what I meant by "the right way" to implement it.