my $10,000 blog

I've never really caught fire with Blogger. I was more of a rampant myspace blogger until late August of last year. That's when I got sued by one of my readers. One of my readers decided that my blogs could be used as evidence that I'm a bad parent. My litigious reader is my ex-husband from 17 years ago. My children with him are now 17 and 18.

So far I'm 10 grand and 10 months into defending myself and have yet to have his nuisance suit heard by a judge.

I started magazine writing in 2002. I was pretty active and published frequently from 2003-2007. I realized that I was way more interested in writing fiction than non-fiction, so I started writing blogs for the mental exercise and to put the ideas that often come to me on paper. I usually made 100-200 bucks per magazine article. I probably made 2500-5000 bucks writing professionally.

I heard from one of my readers/cycling buddies yesterday that one of my magazine articles got plagiarized. I recall specifically that I sold it for 100 bucks.

So what I'm wondering is can I break even by suing the person who plagiarized me? Why is my freedom of speech costing me money? Shouldn't I make money expressing my thoughts, and should my thoughts be hijacked to satisfy other people's greed?