One of my competitors created this essay about the topic of our forums that makes very little sense and and at the very end includes a link to his forum. He created several blogs just to post this with the exact same content, I think he may have slightly changed the title. Do you think this deserves a better ranking or should lower your ranking?
Well he is just leeching traffic away from you why dont you leech his traffic ?? Google can hardly do anything against it other than rank the page low for a certain keywords. But the same is not possible for all keywords.
I wouldn't worry about it if the site has poor quality articles and is guilty of duplicate content. It will never get the chance to rank on the search engines.
that is considered as their own strategy for acquiring a high search engine ranking. Actually I am not sure if that is considered as a black hat method or sort of.
Article submission is not bad per se as long as duplicate content is not done. If you should submit articles to article directories or as a guest article for a blog, then you should make sure that it has not been submitted or posted anywhere else.