Content being copied from our product page hurting our site overall?

[minutiae]

On our product pages, he have short descriptions and some bulleted lists. Resellers of our products, and many other sites who are not resellers are copying this content, often verbatim.

While I'm not as concerned for the product pages themselves as we're hoping the category pages will rank, does this duplication of our content hurt our site overall? FWIW, our brand name is in our domain and often also shown on these sites that copy the content.

[AWCthreads]

If you're the origin of the content, you should keep the credit (authority) on it as age of the content is a factor. That's why fresh content is good. When a manufacturer's new content comes out, we hustle to get the content up as quickly as possible so we reap as much benefit from "freshness" as possible.

Having said that, I've seen some of our manufacturer sites well below us in the rankings largely because their SEO isn't so hot. Some manufacturer's/distributors don't put much emphasis on SEO for various reasons.

If you're doing some good SEO, with your brand in your domain and originating the content, you should be in great shape.