Today, Matt Cutts says:
One misconception that we’ve seen in the last few weeks is the idea that Google doesn’t take as strong action on spammy content in our index if those sites are serving Google ads. To be crystal clear:
* Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines regardless of whether they have ads powered by Google;
I reported that my whole site was copied (more than 500,000 pages). Yet they remain in the index and they continue to run adsense ads.
If you google "welcome to JavaRanch" google ranks them ahead of me on content they copied from me.
If google won't help sites as big as mine, how can folks believe that google will do anything for smaller sites.