Just wondering, because I know there are a lot of autobloggers out there that set up to copy from RSS Feeds, which is TERRIBLE for people trying to run legit sites because the content is being copied without any credit being given (and hurting our page rank). In this sense, does Google pay attention to the date of creation of the post and rank yours higher and mark the other one as "fake" or something? It's sad because some WP Plugins (autoblogging ones) will actually change the post date but I guess the page creation date can't really be altered... any ideas?
No.. This could look like a solution, but in most situations it is not. Assume this, you have written a post and it is immediately copied to another blog by the copycat blogger. For some reasons, his post is crawled and yours take some time. Google thinks that the copied one is the original and yours is the copied content. So Google cannot detect content duplication, they way you said.
I think too it is not as people can easily edit time, the same as different time region in the world. Authority of the site has something to do with the crawling too, you may post the content first on not well indexed site and later post it on well-indexed site like article directory, there is tendency the article directory will be indexed first.