Good question. I think finding what inspires you will help you become a more well rounded designer. Practicing will always help you improve your skills but most importantly design is a talent and not everyone has it. Eventually you will find your own sense of style that sets you apart from others.

That depends. Make sure to ask the person to use their content or read their license agreements. Do NOT assume, especially in this industry. There's an enormous amount of resource sites out there for you to take advantage of for backgrounds, etc.

It's perfectly fine to replicate a design as long as you're not publishing on the web. Inspiration does not mean to copy from another. You can look at someone's design and come up with something of your own from it.

For logo's, use Illustrator. You can draw on paper, scan it to your computer and create a finished product on Illustrator.

I think plagiarism is a interesting yet difficult charge to enforce on the web. I used to work in Intellectual Property and certainly designers are within their rights to make a case against another designer for "stealing" a design but whether it will become a legal issue is another matter all together, due to the complexities and surrounding costs of enforcing these issues. In most instances, the best you can hope for is the infringing site will take a legal notice or request to change the the site design seriously.

Through what process?

Not sure what it is like in the US but hosting providers would not be allowed to make that call in Europe without going through a legal process and then landing in hot water themselves. Establishing burden of proof is difficult matter for a private company to make a judgement on, especially as there are so many legal factors that constitute "design" .

I really don't know the case but I see he is from the UK. From legal point of view, though, whoever infringed "may" have a case to act against the provider if they think the decision was unfair. The moral case may be clear but the legal case is not always so.

You said you worked somewhere that handled copyright infringement? How could you say the offender has a case? It is crystal clear that he in fact infringed on images that were not his. It is a no-brainer.

Edit: Ah. You must not have seen his old site. He has redesigned it twice since.

Original: http://www.flickr.com/photos/elliotjaystocks/516412232/in/photostream
At the bottom, this is Elliot's old site.

Just done some reading and apparently the UK copyright office and courts takes a strong stance against clear web design infringement, which surprises me as when I dealt with patent breaches they are far more difficult to enforce.

Just turned the PC off so will dig the article out in the morning. Pretty sure it was geared toward websites.

Here is another: http://class-99.blogspot.com/2011/03/design-infringement-in-uk-official.html

I was under the assumption that you were reading a government article. I do agree with you on the legalities to a point. It would be hard to bring forward as a criminal case. Thankfully there are civil courts to solve these issues.

This is way beyond off topic so I'm going to end it here.