It’s not clear if News Corp. (NWS) will end up investing in the joint venture, which is designed to control distribution of “print” content to readers like Amazon’s (AMZN) Kindle and Apple’s (AAPL) rumored tablet, or if the company will simply agree to tailor its stuff–most notably, The Wall Street Journal–to the joint venture’s standards.

In either case, News Corp. has yet to officially sign on, sources tell me. An announcement formally acknowledging the JV itself is supposed to be a couple of weeks away, though I have been hearing this for at least six weeks.

No comment from News Corp. or Time Inc., the Time Warner (TWX) publishing unit that has been assembling the JV. Other expected partners include Hearst, Condé Nast and, perhaps, Meredith. (Disclosure: News Corp. owns Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.)

In some ways, News Corp. is an obvious partner for the coalition, which I like to call “Hulu for magazines.” Murdoch has been an outspoken critic of Amazon’s distribution and pricing policies; he argues that by controlling the subscription of digital newspaper and magazines delivered through its e-reader, Amazon deprives publishers of a valuable asset.

Murdoch also wants more money for the stuff it does sell: In an earnings call last week, he said that while the bookseller was now paying his company up to $6.50 a month for each $15 monthly subscription to The Wall Street Journal, that split wasn’t good enough.

The JV is supposed to solve those problems for publishers by letting them control sales, customer billing and pricing. But it is also primarily designed with magazine publishers in mind, and News Corp. isn’t in that business.

Meanwhile, New Corp.’s Dow Jones unit is proprietary about the system it has already built to handle subscriptions to the Journal’s print and online editions and its BlackBerry and iPhone apps.

While it’s possible that the JV could use the Dow Jones subscription/commerce platform as the technological base of the JV, Dow Jones could be prickly if asked to play well with others. “Newspapers and magazines, don’t mix well, for reasons that aren’t obvious to the outside world,” says a News Corp. executive briefed on some of the company’s conversations.

In any event, balancing different partners’ interests is only one of the hurdles facing the JV. Some others, from the story I published last month:

• They’ll have to convince consumers who already have billing relationships with Amazon, Apple and other vendors to sign up with yet another service.
• They’ll have to convince device makers to play along with the strategy, which runs counter to many of their own plans. Both Amazon and Apple, for instance, have intentionally created closed systems that give them control of both devices and distribution.
• They’ll have to create content consumers want to buy. The new product can’t simply be a digital version of the magazines they’re already printing: That’s already available on the Web, and consumers have shown almost no interest in paying for it, and advertisers haven’t fully embraced it either.

So what exactly will the JV be selling? That’s probably the most difficult question for publishers to answer, made even more difficult because they don’t know what capabilities the e-readers of the future will boast. Apple for instance, refuses to even acknowledge to Time Inc. executives that it plans to produce a tablet device, let alone provide them with specs.

That’s the pitch Apple has been making to TV networks in recent weeks. The company is trying to round up support for a monthly subscription service that would deliver TV programs via its multimedia software, multiple sources tell me.

Apple (AAPL) isn’t tying the proposed service to a specific piece of hardware, like its underwhelming Apple TV box or its long-rumored tablet/slate device. Instead, the company is presenting the offer as an extension of its iTunes software and store, which already has 100 million customers.

A so-called “over the top” service could theoretically rival the ones most consumers already  buy from cable TV operators–if Apple is able to get enough buy-in from broadcast and cable TV programmers.

That’s a big if: Apple has told industry executives it wants to launch the service early next year, but I have yet to hear of a single programmer that has made a firm commitment to the company, which has tasked iTunes boss Eddy Cue with promoting the idea.

Industry executives believe that if anyone jumps first, it will be Disney (DIS), since CEO Bob Iger has shown a willingness to experiment with Apple and iTunes in the past: In 2005, Disney was the first player to sell its programming on iTunes, via a-la-carte downloads. And Apple CEO Steve Jobs is Disney’s largest single shareholder, a result of Disney’s 2006 acquisition of Jobs’s Pixar animation studio. Apple didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Network executives I’ve talked to are intrigued by the idea–they are eager to find new revenue streams–but are also wary, for several reasons.

Cable networks, for instance, don’t want to threaten existing relationships and subscription fees from cable providers like Comcast (CMCSA). And programmers are also worried about the effect a subscription service would have on advertising revenue: Even if the service didn’t distribute TV programs until after their initial air date, that could cut into ratings, which now measure viewership over the course of several days.

But the move to deliver TV and movies over the Web is already well under way. Netflix (NFLX), for instance, already bundles free streaming movie and television along with its disc-by-mail subscription service. iTunes and Amazon (AMZN) rent movies on a one-off basis, and Google’s (GOOG) YouTube is trying out the same thing. Meanwhile, Hulu, the joint venture between GE’s (GE) NBC, News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox, and ABC, is figuring out how to launch a paid service that may include rentals, paid downloads or subscriptions.

So Apple’s proposed subscription service, which the company has floated in the past, is no longer a huge stretch. Says one executive briefed on the company’s plans: “I think they might get it right this time.”

I ask this because while Amazon has said it won’t repeat what it did last week, it hasn’t actually sworn off remote book-removal–or  remote anything-removal, for that matter–altogether.

Which means the e-commerce giant can do it again.

On Friday, Amazon told me that it yanked the George Orwell novels from customers’ e-book readers because they were “illegal”–bootlegged copies it never should have sold in the first place. “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,” the company said in a statement.

See the problem? It’s the, big, gaping “in these circumstances” loophole.

I’m still holding out a tiny bit of hope that Amazon (AMZN) is never going to delete a book, or anything it sells its customers, ever again. And that its oddly worded nonpromise is just an oddly worded nonpromise.

But I’ve repeatedly asked Amazon PR folks to mollify me, or at least spell out the circumstances in which they would delete a book again, and I haven’t gotten any response. So I’m fearing the worst: Amazon reserves the right to yank books out of your Kindle, but won’t tell you why or when until it happens.

If you want to play devil’s advocate, you can note that other e-commerce companies have similar abilities. Apple (AAPL) has disclosed that it has a “kill switch” that allows it to remotely wipe out apps from iPhones, ostensibly for security reasons.

And theoretically, the ability to wipe out a rogue iFart app should be as disconcerting as the ability to make a book disappear–intellectual property is intellectual property. But it just doesn’t rankle in the same way.

What to do? Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo wants new legislation to tackle the problem. But even if you like that approach, it’s not going to happen anytime soon–our lawmakers have full plates these days. My suggestion: Demand that Amazon, Apple or whoever else has remote access to your gadgets spell out exactly when, if ever, they will forcibly take back what they sold you. Or don’t buy from them at all.

“Let’s keep an eye on Señor Slim and get to know him better. A lot better.” That’s Slate columnist Jack Shafer on Friday afternoon, worrying that the New York Times will have a difficult time covering Carlos Slim, its billionaire investor/loan shark:

If Times reporters and editorialist criticize Slim, he can wave the clips to prove to his countrymen that he isn’t a vengeful brute. If the Times doesn’t cover Slim’s every move, it will be charged with cutting its investor slack.”

And here, on cue, is the Times’s first deep dive on Slim, via Mexico City bureau chief Marc Lacey. OK, not so much a deep dive as a series of interviews with other journalists who have covered Slim. But that’s sort of appropriate, since the article is trying to assess whether one of the richest men in the world tries to control what the press says about him.

That depends, the Times seem to say, on where the press is based. No one suggests that Slim plans to affect coverage at Britain’s Independent, where he owns one percent of the newspaper, or at the New York Times, where he may one day own 17 percent of the company.

But media in his own backyard? That’s a different story:

Raymundo Riva Palacio, a veteran journalist in Mexico City, said that after he wrote a column in El Universal newspaper in 2006 condemning Mr. Slim as a monopolist, a Slim adviser threatened to remove newspaper ads from his companies.

That was no small threat. Mr. Slim’s holdings are so vast that he controls a large chunk of all advertising countrywide. Eduardo García, a Mexican journalist who runs a Spanish-language financial news Web site and follows Mr. Slim, estimated his wealth at almost $44 billion as of the end of 2008.

‘I took it as part of the natural dynamic between the media and the powers that be in Mexico,’ Mr. Riva Palacio said, adding that the incident was quietly resolved. ‘That’s how things work here.’”

If you want to learn more about Slim’s business background, let me suggest this excellent (and long) August 2007 profile in the Wall Street Journal.

But here’s a nice summation of his influence in his native land:

Carlos Slim is Mexico’s Mr. Monopoly.

It’s hard to spend a day in Mexico and not put money in his pocket. The 67-year-old tycoon controls more than 200 companies–he says he’s ‘lost count’–in telecommunications, cigarettes, construction, mining, bicycles, soft-drinks, airlines, hotels, railways, banking and printing. In all, his companies account for more than a third of the total value of Mexico’s leading stock market index, while his fortune represents 7% of the country’s annual economic output. (At his height, John D. Rockefeller’s wealth was equal to 2.5% of U.S. gross domestic product.)…

How did a Mexican son of Lebanese immigrants rise to such heights? By putting together monopolies, much like John D. Rockefeller did when he developed a stranglehold on refining oil in the industrial era….As Mr. Rockefeller did before him, Mr. Slim has accumulated so much power that he is considered untouchable in his native land, a force as great as the state itself.”

No need to go on about my lack of interest in this forced marriage, which the consumer electronics business has been trying to make work for more than a decade (see the 1993 Time cover to the right). Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has done it for me. If you’re pressed for time, the title will do: “I don’t want my Web TV.”

Here’s what I do want: The ability to use my TV to watch all the great video the Web makes available–actual TV shows and movies like “The Office” on Hulu, “Lost” on ABC.com, “No Country For Old Men” on Netflix’s (NFLX) on-demand service. Which is where Boxee comes in.

The New York-based start-up makes elegant software that cobbles together offerings from all of those services, plus many more–with whatever media you have stored on your hard drive–and serves it up to you on your big screen, with a minimum of fuss. Right now it’s a niche product–it only works on PCs running Linux, or Apple’s (AAPL) Mac mini and AppleTV boxes–but that should change soon.

It’s slick stuff, and when you get a chance to watch it in action, it’s the first time that all those anecdotal stories about people dropping their cable TV subscriptions and just watching Internet video finally make sense: Why pay for cable stations you don’t want when you can watch just about everything you do want, on demand, for free?

This is also why I’m not sure how long the big cable companies will allow Boxee to operate unfettered. As the recent dispute between Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Viacom (VIA) illustrates, the cable operators are increasingly dismayed about paying the cable networks big fees for their content, only to find them giving it away online. And with Boxee providing customers with a real opportunity to drop cable TV in favor of a broadband connection, I worry that it’s a matter of time before they find some way to throttle the company.

Technically, the cable guys (and the telcos, who are also in the TV business) aren’t supposed to be able to do anything about Boxee. They’re just supposed to act as a dumb pipe serving up high-speed Internet access and keep their mouths shut. In the real world, I don’t think that’s going to fly. See: The many bandwidth caps the cable guys are starting to experiment with, which are aimed at heavy Web video users.

Boxee founder Avner Ronen disagrees, of course. He thinks the cable guys will want to work with his company (he plans to make money by licensing his software to gadget makers and extracting fees from content providers like Netflix, but that’s all down the line). And maybe he’s right: When I dropped by his CES booth on Friday, he was being swarmed by emissaries from CableLabs, the cable guys’ tech consortium. They were the third group of cable execs to visit the company that day.

I’ll let Ronen make his case in the video below; and I’ve also included a brief demo video from the company. But that clip doesn’t really do Boxee justice. Ask one of the 100,000 super-early adopters who are using the software themselves. Or any of the nervous cable guys who saw it last week.