Other sites duplicating my content - who gets penalized?

[Eve]

I recently found some sites duplicating/ copying content from one of my sites - without permission. One copied the entire homepage's text. Another copied different parts from all over the site (but I don't mind that one so much as it's actively promoting us). Others have copied small sections. But my question - if you can get banned or penalized by Google for duplicating content, how does Google know who is copying who? I read this article on Google Answers http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=254939a part of which mentions that if sites more authorative than your own copy your content it may be you that gets penalized for it. So what should be done? Try and get all other duplicate content removed from the other sites (Google spam report or persuasion) - or am I worrying about nothing?Can Googlebot itself actually distinguish duplicate content, or do people who work at Google need to establish it as such? Note - try copying and pasting into Google search some unique text from your own site - I was amazed at the duplication going on.There are groups of people whom hijacking ranker sites content and building thousands , millions of dublicated content on their linkfarm web-sites whom are also using 302 redicrects to kill your pagerank and broke your site indexing.This is what is happening to all middle ranker sites like us.They also killed all of our ranks.. and google rather to not do anything for this crap since they are dublicating their adwords revenues thats generated from those crap pages = from the auto-created pages thats conent stolen from our sites...Google justice is broken. It become worser and worser each day, i rather that Google turned to paid per click search engine instead allowing those kind of craps just for Adwords revenues.. huh.. i really started to hate from Google.I am sorry but if those thing wont cleared within this month by Google you have nothing to do to prevent your PR and content hijackings forever..