say you have a website with a load of articles on and someone decides to copy your idea with all of your articles. from a search engine perspective (Google) would both sites be penalized for having duplicate content or just the site that had the articles second.. i.e. the person who stole them be penalized?
If you reported them to the search engines as dupe/stolen, they would review the situation and may remove them from their databases. It's easier just to complain to the webhost about the content and have them pull the site. Most will do it without much question if given proof.