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I agree with you overall, but we've also got eFreedom.com beating StackOverflow with duplicate content in some cases, purely through SEO. In a perfect world, it would be impossible for someone to take StackOverflow's CC data dump and then outrank them.

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Do search engines actually try to "de duplicate" such content?

Are sites that duplicate content without proper attribution properly flagged?

What is the best interest of search engines? Is it the good of the people? Or is this another "tragedy of the common"?

In the later case, what is the best way to fight back?

To questions 1 and 2 the answer is yes. The only real way for most people to fight back is to report them to google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks?pli=1

Unfortunately, unless someone has some inside dirt on their contracts, unrepentant content-dupers like efreedom, nabble, osdir, mail-archive, etc are not able to be dealt with through that form.

I remain hopeful that Google engineers agree that situations like efreedom having a higher PR for content stolen from StackOverflow is not good for their users, but I still wish that little [X] link was still included with each search result. Until then, we'll have to be happy with these sites silently falling off SERPs, if in fact they do.

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