You can't look at the two pages, side-by side and say that curebits was "inspired" - it's blatant copying, and poorly done. Look at all the elements that were basically cut & pasted:

  o FREE "On all Accounts" up top.
  o Thicker border on center rectangle
  o Offset rectangle in center
  o Black /  Same shade of blue for the Name, description of price. 

Interesting to note, there was a (successful in my book) attempt at original design by using Red/Orange instead of Black for the price.

  o "Choose Plan" - Same name, positioning - and bit-for bit identical.  
  o "Cancel Anytime" Immediately above three options
  o Statement of "Confidence"  (Trusted vs Safe Secure)
  o Quoted endorsement below the statement of confidence.

It's not illegal, or even particularly immoral - what it is is shady, and unprofessional behavior by anybody who wanted to be able to work as a well-regarded designer. Whoever did that work didn't have a lot of self respect as a designer - and, based on the professional designers that I know - probably didn't consider themselves to be first and foremost a designer. Probably an engineer who had to slap some UI elements onto their website. If all you are trying to do is bottom-feed and make $$$, (Think about how Zynga, or Samsung build many of their products) - then this is actually a pretty good approach - just copy what has worked for others.

Real world story - when Netscape finally gave up the ghost as a software company and Mike Homer came up on top, and convinced Jim Barkdsale that our future was as a "Portal" - Jim Barksdale, our Beloved and incredibly well regarded CEO, came out at an all hands, spelled it out to the company, and said "The competition is now the portals - and that's something that we can go out and copy." - he used that word, "copy".

Within a week, we had _entire walls_ covered with plotted printouts (remember those?) of Yahoo's Portal, and, underneath those plotted printouts - element by element replicas depicting Netscape.com. You could almost overlay them.

It was successful. Netscape sold for $4 Billion to AOL ($10 Billion on the last day of trading) - but I can guarantee you that none of those designers were particularly proud of the work they where doing, and hopefully didn't put it in their portfolio.

When does it cross the line from inspired to copied? The HTML markup for the 3 panel middle thing is almost identical. The Choose Plan buttons are pixel for pixel identical according to imagemagick compare. Was the other page just inspired also?

I would say that the "Choose Plan" buttons are a little more than "inspiration". In fact, they're exact copies:

http://imgur.com/Foah7

I agree.. BUT: i.e. the "Choose plans" buttons are just copied without any change from the 37Signals signup page. Compare http://highrisehq.com/images/btn_chooseplan_small.png with http://www.curebit.com/images/icons/choose_btn_small.png?132...

It's a little more than skin deep.