Fair enough. But if you’re that confident in your model–which, in short, allows Web surfers to look in on the FT.com site 10 times a month for free but demands payment for anything more than that–what’s with the following message at the bottom of each story?

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009. You may share using our article tools. Please don’t cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.

Anyone else think that strikes a weird tone between pleading and chiding? I’m told the note started showing up on FT stories about three weeks ago and that staffers at the paper are a bit confused about it as well. Here’s how FT spokeswoman Darcy Keller explains the message, via email:

The FT copyright simply protects our ownership of FT content. There is obviously a distinction between third parties referring to FT articles and linking back to FT.com and those that reuse and distribute our content without attributing it to the FT.

Obviously there is! But there’s also an obvious distinction between friends and colleagues who pass along an interesting article and, say, people who run sleazy “scraper” sites that publish other people’s copy in the hope of gaming Google’s (GOOG) search engine. Right? And more important: The people in the second category won’t be deterred by a copyright note–even a sternly worded one. Right?

Obligatory to-be-sure grafs: News Corp.’s (NWS) Dow Jones, which owns this (free) Web site, also charges for access to (some of) its Wall Street Journal. And it also tells people not to distribute WSJ.com stories without its permission. But in order to find that boilerplate language, you’d have to seek out the “Subscriber Agreement & Terms of Use” page, and slug your way through legalese until you got to section 6 (b)–“Limitations on Use.” Or you can just trust me. Does that make you less likely to copy and paste this story?

That’s one lesson you might derive from this odd lawsuit: The Financial Times is suing Stephen Schwarzman’s Blackstone Group (BX), claiming that the private equity group has been defrauding it since 2002. How? By allowing multiple people to use a single account to access articles on the paper’s FT.com site.

The FT figures that this was done with the approval a “senior” Blackstone finance executive and constitutes a “massive” crime since a yearly subscription to the paper’s Web site costs up to $299 a year. It’s suing Blackstone for copyright violation and computer fraud. (Redundant disclosure: The FT competes with The Wall Street Journal, which owns this Web site and which also charges for comprehensive access to its Web property.)

And if you’re thinking this seems like an odd way for a powerhouse publisher to settle a billing dispute with a giant private equity company (even after the economic meltdown, Blackstone sports a $1.2 billion market cap), well, you’re not alone. I double-checked with an FT spokeswoman who told me that the company had no comment, but confirmed that the complaint below is indeed real.

Thanks to CityFile for pointing this one out.

Black Stone

At first, it was all business when Chernin said while he had a “healthy” level of respect and paranoia for Facebook–which is the hot-on-its-heels-second social network breathing down the neck of News Corp.-owned MySpace–that in most countries MySpace continued to set the growth pace.

And then Chernin, who is quite a bit sassier in person, showed a little bit of that humor when he noted: “Assuming we’re [MySpace] worth significantly more than they are, I think they’re worth at least $15 billion.”

That’s right, MySpace, You’re No. 1 and don’t let that Harvard/Silicon Valley geek make that look like No. 23!

Sounds like Chernin has joined the Mark Zuckerberg School of Pick-a-Silly-Number-out-of-the-Air Mathematics Club, which we at BoomTown look upon with such respect!

OK, using that logic, let me sharpen up my pencil here and make an estimate of the worth of this News Corp.-owned site, AllThingsD.com.

Hmm. Hmmm. Throwing in a few free subscriptions to the print Wall Street Journal, a stale box of Walt Mossberg‘s Cohibas and noodling over Henry Blodget’s latest riff on someone else’s asinine analysis that TechCrunch is worth $100 million, we are prepared to declare that ATD is worth $654 and some change John Paczkowski has in his pocket.

Why so low? You might say lack of self-esteem. We’d say it’s our lack of lack of shame.

In any case, if you want to hear him talk more, I got to interview Chernin at D5 this year, where we talked about MySpace and the social-networking business, as well as other issues like the then-still-undone deal to buy Dow Jones.

See here: