Duplicate Content Penalty

[trigatch4]

If you're the original owner of content, and someone copies YOUR content by scraping your site or something, are you also penalized? How does google, or any SE for that matter, discriminate between the two (or three or ten or fifty)?

Thinking of starting an article directory type thing with all unique articles... that is why i ask.

 

[zenglider]

As far as I know Google penalizes the second copy to make it in to the index. So if someone scrapes your site and their copy gets indexed first the only thing you can do is report them so they don't get the credit.