What is the purpose of cloning a website?

This might be a really stupid question...but what is the purpose of cloning a website? Wouldnt it basically be the exact same website and all be duplicate content? Also couldnt the original owner get your site removed if they wanted? Or is this maybe just used for PPC landing pages? Authority sites? Can someone please tell me why people clone sites?

Cloning a website is reproducing the functionality of the site being cloned. For example, Fiverr.com is a micro jobs site, charging only 5 dollars. There are plenty of clones with twists on fiverr, for example: Gigbucks, tenbux, 10den, etc. These can be in a different niche, charge a different rate, and have a different flow to them. In terms of getting the site "removed" as long as there is no copyright infringement, aka passing the website off as say "fiverrr.com" or claiming to be the same company, you're usually in the clear. I am not a lawyer, but the basis is that if the code is written from scratch (not copied from the source), there can be no claims to intellectual property.

There are popular clones of ebay, fiverr, etsy, adfly, groupon, etc - with entire companies focused on providing the cloned scripts to a userbase.

Hope that helps.

You can see for example all those Fiverr clones. Some of them making money and they are just clones.
Sometime people want to make a clone but they use it for other purposes.

There are no stupid questions.

Look at the wealth of the guys behind Rocket Internet and you'll soon see the point of cloning done right