The amount of code required to copy sites is almost criminally small, a VERY short piece of PHP will do the trick and be transparent enough to make googlebot read the page, which is what the intention is.
I made one as a test when learning PHP that could easily make any root site appear as an html page on a domain I owned. It isn't hard to then filter out and redirect on everything except googlebot. With the current set of parameters that google has adopted, it looks like the NEWER page gets the revelvancy over the original root domain, which is INSANE.
It's getting ugly out there. Maybe the google boys made a few too many dollars and are not watching the development as closely as before.
Alex