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
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.