Someone copied my articles to hundreds of directories - any recourse?

I just discovered that someone went to one of my sites and copied my articles word-for-word and used Article Marketing Robot (I'm assuming) to blast them to hundreds of article directories, linking back to their own site. The great thing is that a lot of these articles are now outranking my own site for the keywords they were targeting.

It's easy enough to send a DMCA notice if a single website copies your stuff, but what am I supposed to do in this case? It would take me a month to file 1000 DMCA notices, and I doubt many of the article directories even care.

In a lot of cases I wouldn't even care about this, but like I said, the crap he blasted out is outranking my site now. The articles are just on directories; not on a website this person owns, so I'm assuming there's probably nothing I can do about this, which is pretty crappy. Looking at their other articles, they did the same exact thing with other people's articles: blatantly stole them and submitted them to thousands of directories under their own name.

I feel like doing the same thing back to them.