Well, yes, in fact, bloggers do have legal rights
Section 230 (Section 230 of Title 47 of the United States Code (47 USC § 230) ) says that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider, which means your readers’ comments, entries written by guest bloggers, tips sent by email, and information provided to you through an RSS feed would all likely be considered information provided by another content provider. This would mean that you would not be held liable for defamatory statements contained in it. (Bloggers Rights)
Freedom of speech is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and Internet bullies shouldn’t use the law to stifle legitimate free expression…from Blogger’s Rights
In light of recent issues, I take ownership for posting on a forum to ask other webmasters how to deal with someone whom I called a jerk who was harrassing me, I shouldn’t have done and I take ownership of what I said however in order to stop association with me and my blog, he should have stop following me around from forum to forum bullying/pestering me to make sure I did what he requested, as a webmaster of my blog, I deleted the comment as requested, I contacted Bing and Google to have the cached pages removed but constantly bullying me on two different forums only makes the association between him and my blog more current and higher up in the crawls, hopefully within the next few days, the cached pages will be removed from Bing and Google and it will be a distant annoyance. (I’m sure there is a legitmate side to his story and maybe he’ll start his own blog, not mine and not through the multi-forums where I post questions for programming or web help). And for the record, Bing is so relatively new to the whole search engine concept, I had no idea how to do anything on it, I don’t normally use it.
But no matter what, if you have someone harrassing you or bullying you on your blog or on the internet, there are laws to protect you the blogger, we have rights too.
The more and more I think about it, I think I might get my doctorate in information technology, specifically internet related functions or maybe in law, that might be interesting. (and just in case he’s reading this because I have the weird feeling that he is because of strange comments left on forums, dude, I’m months away not years from getting my masters in accounting, not webdesign)
And one other thing, its bugging me, I won’t be able to sleep unless i just post it, webmasters don’t know everything, sometimes we have to ask for help too doesn’t mean that we wanted to be followed around and pestered on the internet.