Looks like your competitor might be manipulating the server clock settings. Is this issue between two WordPress sites?

That could be one of the biggest problems for webmasters these days (most of them don't realize their content is copied and then re-published in almost real-time with a fake/sooner date to try to trick search engines that the scraper, not the original website, published the content first). Hopefully Google/Bing will resolve it soon and will not consider a date as the only factor when it comes to making a decision which website is the real and the first publisher of the content.

A related problem is that Google/Bing algos put too much emphasis on the 'fresh date' (in result websites that have a strong authority can copy a 5-year old content from a webstite with less authority, put a fresh date, and this 'authority scraper' will show up first in search results despite the fact it copied the content from a less-authority website).

What happens if you take a few of your post titles, put them in double-quotes and search in Google?
Like this:

"Top tips for choosing red widgets"

Does your competitor appear anywhere in the search results? If no, don't worry and forget about him. If yes, serve him a DMCA Notice.

@adder he is there in the result.

DMCA is the common answer, but DMCA is is a USA law and affects sites hosted in the US so the first step is to do a whois search to find out where the offending site is hosted. IF it is a USA hosting company, if the hosts IP address is a US host, you can serve the webmaster and or their host with a DMCA takedown notice. The issue with the time shows suggests they are playing with the server time settings to get the jump on your RSS feeds, but they could just be in a significantly different time zone. Don't forget that DMCA allows for "Fair Use" if they are not copying your entire article, but only the first few lines, that is not a violation of the terms of DMCA.

I recommend a visit to the Charter here: [webmasterworld.com...] where you can find all the links to the what, how, why of DMCA and know how to proceed.

thanks @not2easy
and yes he is not copying my whole content..he just copy first fee lines.

Does their copy of your headlines link back to your site or does it link to a page on their site? I would check it to be sure that haven't copied the entire article.

@not2easy thanks again
and yes he is copying my title, heading and first few lines of my articles with internal links as well. also he is giving one link back to the original post.

it sounds to me like he's using your RSS feed normally.
if you don't want people to use an RSS feed in that way, then you need to remove the feed.

the only bit that is not normal, is when he changes the times so it's prior to yours -- but that might just be the way his server is set up with the wrong time. i would probably give him the benefit of the doubt with that, because if all he's got on his site is a few lines off your feed, and he's linking back to your full article after every single post, then who cares -- google should pick up that you are the original author easy-peasy

google should pick up that you are the original author

You'd think they would eventually notice that the timestamp on a given page is later than the time it was crawled. Is there any documentation on things like this happening?

The location of the server in question hasn't been established here, it is one possibility that the server time was incorrect. But if the site is only using the RSS feed as published it is less likely there was any manipulation.

And its a feedburner feed as well, which is google. So you'd think it would be easy for them to tell where it appeared first