From what I gathered around, Disavow doesn't work, and once your site takes a nose dive in rank you will never be able to regain your ranking. Google doesn't care once they check a site that was ranking high for a keyword, they see those spammers linking back to you they lower your rank for that keyword and never remove it, its not a penalty either, they basically punish you without penalizing you so either way you are screwed.

I used Disavow 3 months ago and haven't seen any change, and the same scrapers using my stuff and linking back to me rank higher than me.

These people who work google spam department are some fat cats who just screw with the system search every two months so it looks like they are doing their job and they can keep there awesome salary at Google.

They screwed a lot of people over who rely on google search for their businesses.

Disavow is garbage and false, it doesn't work, it could even harm your website, but google will only tell you a few months later like oh sorry guys disavow is useless it will screw you up! and they giggle under their breath and move on to their cozy desk area.

Disavow really does work, I have been doing it for a lot of clients who come to me to clean up their link profiles.

What I'm seeing now is it's taking around 5 to 6 weeks before you're going to see a difference in rankings and traffic. But, you have to make sure your disavow THE RIGHT LINKS. If you're just disavowing specific URLs, then you may be missing other pages on the same site. If it's a really bad site, then you should just go ahead and disavow the whole domain like this:

domain:yourbadsitethatlinkstoyou.com

Keep in mind that you have to find ALL the links to your site and then go through all of them. Right now I really like Cemper's Link Detox tool (linkresearchtools.com) for an initial view of the links (you have to get all your links, though). Use something like Majestic SEO to get all the links and then run them through Link Detox and look at them all.

If you're not seeing results from disavow, then you're disavowing the wrong links or not finding all of the links that you should disavow.

I think (and hope they do) that Google should automatically discount sites that regularly scrape a wide range of other sites. I am pretty sure it is fairly easy (in particular for Google) to detect such sites over time automatically instead of having webmasters worry about them.