We all know that at least in theory, google penalize the stolen content. Right? 🙂
“Google crawls site A every hour and site B once in a day. Site B writes an article, site A copies it changing time stamp. Site A gets crawled first by Googlebot. Whose content is original in Google’s eyes and rank highly? If it’s A, then how does that do justice to site B?”
Google’s Matt Cutts answer that question in a video. It seems that Google has no real way to find the original article. He suggests that you manually report infringing sites. In general, sites that have better backlinks will get better rankings, no matter if their content is original or not.