There has been a lot of recent discussion online about a certain small business website gone awry. It was the result of a disgruntled, unpaid website developer.

The website developer created a website for a chiropractic firm, Winona Chiropractic Center (http://winonachiropractic.com), and provided the company with hosting services. According to a recent message posted on the website, when the company 'failed to pay any of their total web design bill, despite repeated attempts by their web design agency to collect,' the designer, claiming to have 'a childish sense of humor,' hijacked the website and used it to inform the world of how he had been stiffed by the business.

While the website developer's behavior has been criticized by some in the website development industry, I have to admit that I feel his or her pain. No matter what business you are in, when a deadbeat client fails to pay their bill, you really want to punish them.

In the case of the Winona Chiropractic Center, the website developer claims that the developer was more than patient, writing, 'Please note that I have waited years for this business to pay. I have hosted their site for free since about 2007. This is me giving up.'

'Personally, I wouldn't trust a doctor of any kind who couldn't pony up for what, in the grand scheme of things, is a small charge for their web design,' the statement continued. 'Do what you will, though.'

The site gathered some attention across the Internet. However, the developer had a change of heart and a statement on the website now reads, 'This site has been removed. Ok, I did what I probably should have done to begin with, and have removed this site entirely. Sorry folks.'

While I will stop short of condoning the behavior of this unknown website developer, I do sympathize. The lesson to be learned here is quite simple. Pay up for services rendered or else there is a chance that it will come back to haunt you.

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Many people that tried to access the official National Weather Service (NWS) website last week encountered significant problems and issues. The government website's performance has been consistently sluggish and, at times, much of its content, which includes important forecasts and weather warnings, has been totally inaccessible.

These issues could not have come at a worse time, when a massive, life threatening storm was affecting more than 100 million people.

For a government agency whose mission is to protect the life and property of its citizens, the dissemination of timely information, particularly during hazardous weather events, is vital. In this day and age, it is important for our government to effectively leverage technology to communicate information to the people of America, particularly during hazardous weather events. Last week, the National Weather Service failed.

In addition to last week's poor performance, the NWS website has come under fire recently for its poor usability and design.

The problem isn't that the website doesn't offer enough information, it offers way too much. The home page, for example, links to more than 100 other websites, features a confusing map, and is awkwardly sized.

The website needs to be more organized and useable. Although there is a lot of useful content on the site, the information is scattered across many different pages and there is a lot of redundancy.

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While the primary Internet copyright concerns seem to surround digital piracy and the sale of counterfeit goods, everyone who publishes original content on the Internet runs the risk of having that content stolen.

Even if the content is not passed off as original and it is republished with credit to the author, anyone that uses your work for their own benefit is stealing traffic, costing you money and messing with your search engine optimization campaign. Even if the negative effect is minimal, anyone copying your work is taking advantage of you and the business that you have worked hard to build.

There is no doubt that copyright infringement and trademark infringement are rampant and the problem is becoming increasingly difficult to police. However, for anyone that creates original content online, there are things you can do.

In the US, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, also known as the DMCA, gives copyright owners the right to send takedown notices to those who infringe upon an owner's copyrights. Basically, if someone steals your original work and posts it to their website, without your approval, you have the option of pressuring the web host company to take down that material.

However, web hosts enjoy broad immunity from lawsuits over copyright infringement if they act swiftly to remove infringing content when they are made aware of it, making DMCA takedown notices extremely successful.

While sending the notice isn't difficult, the entire process can be time consuming. There is never a good time to be pulled away from your business to take the time to prepare and send these letters.

While Google says that it is looking at changes that will affect sites that copy others' content and sites with low levels of original content, there are also companies out there that will help individuals and businesses streamline their DMCA take down processes

It is unfortunate that we need laws regulating Internet content, but the truth is that the web still remains a wild-west. All of the things that most ordinary people would never do in the real world are done online without regard.

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