Google puts substantial effort into identifying copycat content. The main way they do that is to see which site had the content first.
Unfortunately with smaller sites, it could be a few days till their search bot finds the content, and often the copycat sites have agressive scrapers so appear to have the content first.
From googles point of view, the copycat is the original, and the original is the copycat.
There are also some kinds of copycat content which users actually prefer. For example, sites which bypass paywalls, sites which quote other sites, sites that display decrapified content from another site, etc.