Word-for-word copies of my articles massively outranking the original. What can I do?

Hey Warriors,

So I'm having this problem a great deal. I write articles which often "go viral" as they say and get copied to hundreds and sometimes thousands of websites across the internet.

Unfortunately, this leads to my articles being outranked by copies, even though mine was published and indexed before all of the rest.

With exact title match searches, sometimes my original article will be buried way back on page 5 or even further down.

Why is this happening? What can I do to stop it? It's killing what could be a lot of traffic for me through the search engines.

The problem is that I appreciate people posting my work as it gives me notoriety and has resulted in my name becoming somewhat "known" but I would like all of that search engine traffic as well.

Anyone have any ideas? I've started making the sites that syndicate my work put a link back to the original article in the body of every article of mine they post but it doesn't seem to be making a bit of difference.

My site is pretty well SEO'd with PR4 after less than 9 months online and well over 220k links in Google Webmaster Tools, if that makes a difference at all.

Thanks for your help.