Sorry Barry missed this (and must have missed the email too
).
Google will not penalise you for duplicate content. What it will do is select only one of the pages to list and rank, and the other won't come up in the search results. This is probably why people talk of penalties when in fact it makes perfect sense to the user. I'm assuming the article is being duplicated on the same site?
One way round this if you want the new via version of the same article, on a different URL to be the one google returns on it's search results is to use the canonical link tag. This tells google which of the urls to list, and any links you've got that point to the other url aren't wasted and their benefit is passed on to the preferred url.
Hope that helps.