Is it good to scrap articles from anywhere and use them?

You will not benefit at all from duplicate content

Well that certainly would eliminate the need to ever write your own content ever again would it not?

No, that's not an acceptable way to gain backlinks, it won't hold any weight at all.

It isn't duplicate content. It's syndicated content, Sensei.

The difference between the two is explained in this post and this article.

The value of the backlink has nothing at all to do with whether or not the content to which it's attached has previously been published. It's determined by a large variety of other factors, but that isn't one of them, Corey. (Otherwise nobody making a living from article syndication would be benefitting at all from their backlinks, would they?!)

You don't need to "scrape" them, to do this. You can re-publish them freely, subject to the TOS of each article directory from which you take them. This is what they're there for. That's why article directories exist. (The TOS will always specify that you need to take the whole article, not edit/alter it in any way, and of course to include the author's own resource-box and links with it, otherwise it would be breach of copyright, i.e. theft - and you'd get DMCA site take-down notices served on your hosting company!).

But assuming that you're intending to do all that, and not breach the article directories' TOS, your problem with it will be simply that most "Web 2.0 sites" don't accept syndicated content, under their own terms of service, so you'll quickly get into trouble from them anyway.

"Panda-safe" doesn't arise: that wouldn't be your problem anyway, and it wouldn't be your own site (to which you're clearly planning to add some sort of link on the same page?) that would get into trouble.

"Penguin-safe" is a different matter: that's going to depend on the number of times you do it, and the relevance of the sites (not just "the pages"!) on which you do it, to your own site. Nobody can predict this confidently. I wouldn't want to risk it, myself. But the main reason for not doing it is perhaps the terms of service of the Web 2.0 sites concerned (i.e. the fact that many of them don't allow syndicated content in the first place). And the SEO value of the content itself would be very small. People who syndicate articles from directories are doing so not for any SEO benefits, but because it's content they want to share with their readers/visitors/subscribers - which wouldn't arise at all, for your proposed purpose in doing so.

So ... bottom line: it won't help you (albeit not for the reasons suggested above!).

Decent Web 2.0 sites are quite strict about the content that they will accept so if you are going to go to the trouble of creating a page manually then you might as well do it properly. How hard is it to load up your speech recognition software and re-write a relevant article in your own words???!!!

No It is not "SAFE" :p

I do not think it is a good idea to just find content that is lying around the Internet and put it to your own use.

The best type of articles to use are those that are fresh and written by you or your staff.

Syndicating content hmmm.....isn't this what WP-ROBOT does? If you want to do this, just buy WP-Robot and it's pretty easy to achieve.

Although you wouldn't be able to do it with a web 2.0, at least I don't think so.

These threads never cease to amaze me. What have we become?

My short opinion, it's not good at all.

Duplicate content is duplicate content, and does nothing but attracts penalty. You should desist from any advice recommending such practices.

That will not help you gain credibility with your site through the search engines. I have had some of my content STOLEN from a post I rank number on Google and the thief ranked first page for maybe a week and Im still there. It's truly not worth it.(Plus, I could have requested a DMCA removal)

stealing others content in hopes to build your business is a horrible idea, doesn't sound like you should be running a business at all if you cant see that stealing others content for your personal gain isn't a good idea.

Duplicate content is NOT Safe..
But you can use some article spin tool to make unique.

A little help from my side, if you dont wanna write whole article yourself then copy and paste an article from any website from your Niche and try to re-write it, spin it in your sentences, now you have your unique article that Search Engines will never penalize them, hope this technique will work for you.

Not good and not safe too because If you are copying someone's else content and for instance he/she came across to your blog/site, they can claim on you as well... So my opinion would be 'No'