Why do you protect your Web site content? If you are in journalism it might well be because you believe that the content value is very high. That then justifies limiting access through subscriptions whether they are free of for a fee. In the former case you see the content as directly revenue generating while the latter provides you with a mailing list that you most likely intend to leverage into a revenue stream.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) is in the former category and they offer subscription access to their content for $99 per year or $9.95 per month.

But here’s the odd thing: If you are a BlackBerry user then you can use the free reader provided by the WSJ that gives you access to the paper’s content for free. Presumably the WSJ thinks that the people who use BlackBerrys are somehow more deserving or perhaps simply just a better bet to be teased into subscribing.

So how do they provide these privileged users with access? Here’s a regular URL for an article. If you point your browser at this URL and you’re not a logged in subscriber you’ll get the tease and an invite to subscribe.

But here’s the URL that BlackBerry users access. Try it, unless something has changed in the last few days, you’ll get access to the article’s full text.

I’m guessing that the script behind the mobile URL logs in as a registered user, grabs the content from the appended URL, and then sends that to the user in a stripped down, BlackBerry friendly format.

Here’s another thing: It turns out that you can also get the WSJ content by changing the request referrer to Google News or, even more easily and assuming you know what you’re looking for, by doing a Digg search.

So what are the lessons from the above? First, if you protect your content ask yourself why you are doing so? Is it to generate revenue or to cultivate an appearance of enhanced value? If it’s the latter ask yourself how long that image will last because unless you have truly unique content someone, somewhere, will eventually (and sooner rather than later) undercut your value by offering similarly valuable content for free or at the very least for less.

Second, ask yourself if you have really protected your content? It’s one thing to build a wall that requires users to log in but quite another to also create a side entrance that merely requires knowledge of where it is to get access.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.