NewsCorp may buy Simon & Schuster
- Thread starter James Cole
- Start date
Well, it could cause me to abandon the line. I won't do business with Rupert Murdoch.
Dependent how good your German is, you could read the ST novels from the German publisher CrossCult.
Dependent how good your German is, you could read the ST novels from the German publisher CrossCult.
That's an appealing notion.
However, if I ever learned German well enough to read Star Trek novels, I'd probably get caught back up reading Perry Rhodan, which I read (in translation) from 1971 until the American editions stopped about 1979. Then I'd never have time for Trek, since I'm something like 2500 issues behind on my Perry Rhodan reading.
Ian Keldon
Fleet Captain
Hey Todd, as an aside: where did you get your avatar? I LIKE it! 
Dependent how good your German is, you could read the ST novels from the German publisher CrossCult.
But then he's still supporting Murdoch, since I'm sure CultCross is paying Simon and Shuster for the reprint rights.
I don't think one can worry too much about which multigajillionaire owns a piece of any given thing, since you'd pretty much have to live on a desert island to avoid using something that was connected to them in some way. For instance, the Star Wars films are distributed by 20th Century Fox, which is a subsidiary of Murdoch's NewsCorp. Would you boycott Star Wars for the rest of your life because of that? Or Planet of the Apes or Die Hard or X-Men or the Alien franchise? What about The Shield or Burn Notice or White Collar? Do you boycott Hulu and Photobucket because NewsCorp owns them? What about its 5% share in MySpace?
The thing to remember is that there are countless layers of hierarchy between the things you actually watch or read or use and the moguls who ultimately profit from them. For instance, there was all that furor recently over the homophobic statements of the guy who owned the Chick-Fil-A corporation, but that wasn't the fault of the people who owned the individual restaurant franchises or the people they employed (many of whom are gay themselves). Boycotting their restaurants probably hurt those people lower on the totem pole a lot more than it hurt the owner. At that level, these moguls don't have much contact with the actual businesses they own. They just see the money that comes in from them, and it's all kind of interchangeable to them.
Dependent how good your German is, you could read the ST novels from the German publisher CrossCult.
Who surely pays Pocket (and its owners) and CBS to be allowed to publish them?
Dependent how good your German is, you could read the ST novels from the German publisher CrossCult.
Who surely pays Pocket (and its owners) and CBS to be allowed to publish them?
Does CultCross pay S&S to print German translations? Or does CC only pay CBS?
'Cos S&S doesn't retain any copyright to the books. It could be like the situation where IDW was reprinting Trek comics originally from DC Comics, because DC didn't retain any rights to those comics after their contract with Paramount expired.
Which is why the question is, does S&S's license with CBS give S&S royalties from foreign translations, or do royalties only get paid to the authors?
MySpace... MySpace... that sounds vaguely familiar. Do they have a Facebook page?
Well, Disney now owns the SW franchise, so I assume any new films will be released under one of Disney's banners, not Fox. Anyway, after the prequels, my interest in seeing any more Star Wars is now dipping into negative numbers.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes was pretty good, and I wouldn't mind seeing a sequel, but it's easier for me to justify one movie a year from Fox than it is to justify a steady stream of books from Murdoch's Evil Empire. I seriously avoid HarperCollins, unless it's a new Tim Powers. The other properties are long-since played out, and if Prometheus is any indicator, are as deep into the crap well as Star Wars at this point.
Are those TV shows? I don't watch TV.
Don't think I've ever used Photobucket; Tumblr is lots more fun. Hulu re-runs TV shows, and, as noted above, I don't watch TV.
MyWhat? I don't think anyone has used MySpace -- apart from no-name indie bands -- since Facebook killed it dead dead dead. No great loss there.
Nice attempt to make the protesters worse than Cathy. Sorry, not buying it. I've worked for deeply homophobic companies; they eventually learned they must change or die. Chik-Fil-A needs some kind of wake-up call to prompt them to move on from the '50's. If we don't work every angle (including boycotts and protests) they will have no incentive to leave their hatefulness behind.
So, is it wrong of me to decide not to contribute even one penny of my hard-earned money to people who hate me? It's pretty much the only leverage we have against their kind of evil, so I'm going to leverage it for all its worth.
Hey Todd, as an aside: where did you get your avatar? I LIKE it!
Ian, it comes from the Frank R. Paul-painted cover of the October, 1953 issue of Science-Fiction Plus, edited by Hugo Gernsback (the guy the Hugo Award is named after.)
I turned the image upside down, to make it all the more obvious that Roddenberry & Jefferies took inspiration from that illustration when designing the Starship Enterprise.
I like knowing there's a link between Gernsback & Paul (editor & cover artist, respectively) of the first-ever science fiction (or "scientifiction") magazine -- Amazing Stories -- and StarTrek.
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It used to be - then the shares tanked. Now he's just a multi-millionaire.
Except for when its something you really want to read or see. Seems a bit hypocritical.
You completely missed my point. Of course I agree with you about homophobes; I'd be an idiot not to. But the kind of extremism you're engaging in is no more realistic or constructive than the extremism of people like Murdoch or that Chik-Fil-A owner. You're spreading your net of hostility so wide that it encompasses a lot of people who aren't to blame for the attitudes or choices of a few people a dozen steps higher on the corporate ladder. Hell, now you're even attacking me, even though I agree with your basic morals, just because I question your methods. That's not constructive in any way. Extremism in any direction is just part of the problem, not part of the solution.
See, that's just the kind of blind, unfair generalization I'm talking about. There are probably millions of people working for companies that happen to be owned by moguls like Murdoch, and those people come from all stripes, all walks of life, all ideologies and ethnic groups and social classes and lifestyles.
And come on, you know how the moguls work. They give themselves raises and bonuses even when their corporations are tanking. The only people who ever feel any financial sting if their businesses do badly are the employees lower down, the people who are not to blame for what the moguls believe or do.
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