Daily News Links

• A new phase of wrangling over the future of the dominant open-source license, the General Public License, is set to begin today and to end 90 days afterward.  The third discussion draft of GPL version 3 is scheduled for release at 7 a.m. PDT on Wednesday, Brett Smith, a licensing compliance engineer for the Free Software Foundation said in a mailing list posting Monday.  Read more here (from CNET News.com).
• Researchers are trying to figure out how to make more of the good stuff float to the top of Internet search engines and keep more of the bad stuff buried.  QUT Associate Professor Audun Josang is trying to come up with a system through which search engines would rank Web sites based on their reputation, based in part on input from the broad Internet community of users.  Read more here (from PC World).
• One in seven Australian office workers has looked at online porn at work, and even more use office hours for online gambling, according to security company Websense.  Read more here (from The Age).
• Citizendium founder Larry Sanger says he co-started Wikipedia, but don't tell that to Jimmy Wales.  Read more here (from FindLaw).
• YouTube may soon get a taste of its own medicine if The CW greenlights a reality pilot that would put the Web's best user-generated content on weekly TV. Ghen Maynard, CBS Paramount Network Television Entertainment Group's alternative programming guru, whose company co-owns the young-adult network with Time Warner, has been spearheading the project under the working title of Viewsers.  Read more here (from Broadcasting & Cable).
• Digital rights company Corbis Corp. suffered defeat in a cybersquatting complaint it brought against John Pickworth, a British Web designer, the World Intellectual Property Organization said Monday.  Read more here (from FindLaw).
• A little under one-third of US households have no Internet access, with most of the holdouts seeing little use for it in their lives, says a survey by Park Associates, a Dallas-based market research firm. Many respondents say: "I do all my e-commerce shopping and YouTube-watching at work."  Read more here (from Reuters).
• Napster and AT&T have agreed to a deal to provide some of the top US phone company's wireless and high-speed internet customers with free digital music.  Read more here (from Australian IT).
• On the Web, "you essentially have a public wall where anybody can put up a billboard and say anything," says PEJ's Tom Rosenstiel. "And if the wall attracts a crowd, mainstream media write about it. ... If something is out there and having an impact, you probably have a responsibility to report it. But you have no less a responsibility to tell me if it's believable or not."  Read more here (from USA Today).
• As the US 2008 presidential campaign gets rolling, Google is forming a political sales team. Political campaigns are expected to shift more of their advertising dollars to the Web.  Read more here (from the Los Angeles Times).
• Gemstar-TV Guide will launch a test version next month of an online video search tool that allows viewers to find clips and full episodes of TV shows on the Web. The tool will aggregate programming produced by media companies, not user-generated videos found on sites like YouTube.  Read more here (from Yahoo! News).
• The Nine Network has lost six consecutive ratings weeks for the first time since the introduction of people meters in 1991. And the picture is even gloomier for the former ratings powerhouse after it was trounced on Sunday night.  Read more here (from The Australian).
• Private technology developers are preparing to fight for a role in the federal Government's $10 billion water plan.  Read more here (from Australian IT).
• Oracle has licensed patents of the Open Invention Network, a group seeking to give open-source allies some clout in an intellectual property realm that favors the incumbent proprietary software powers.  The network's patents are available royalty-free to any party that agrees not to file infringement suits involving its own patents "against the Linux environment." Under the network's terms, that environment includes not just the kernel at the heart of the open-source operating system, but also higher-level components including the open-source MySQL and PostgreSQL databases that compete with Oracle's own core products.  Read more here (from CNET News.com).
• In the UK Prince Andrew's 17-year-old daughter is blogging about British royal life on her MySpace page.  Read more here (from the The Mail on Sunday).
• Australia's love affair with flat screen televisions pushed spending on lifestyle technology to more than $4.5 billion in 2006.  Read more here (from the Sydney Morning Herald).
• Landmark plans by APN News & Media to outsource most of the editorial production of its New Zealand newspapers will herald the start of broader changes in media employment practices, according to the company handling the APN proposal.   Read more here (from The Australian).
• The federal Australian Government is on a collision course with South Australian politicians over its decision to cut funding to a key regional broadband development program.  Read more here (from Australian IT).
• Video will play a starring role in Time Inc.'s digital future, and the company sees itself in an ideal position to compete directly with networks by creating compelling original stories that arise from the voices of its strong publishing brands, Executive Vice President John Squires told a media briefing at Time Inc. headquarters yesterday.  Read more here (from Media Post).
• Microsoft said on Monday it had sold 20 million consumer copies of the new Windows Vista operating system worldwide in February. But analysts said the data shed little light on the program's popularity during its first month on the market.  By comparison, Windows XP, Vista's predecessor, sold 17 million copies in the two months following its 2001 launch, Microsoft said. "It's a stronger than expected start," Bill Mannion, a director of product marketing for Windows, said in an interview.  Read more here (from the Sydney Morning Herald).
• Brazil has 32.1 million Internet users, the most in South America, the government census bureau said Friday.  Read more here (from CNN).
• In a telephone interview conducted ahead of his visit to Australia next month for the education.au conference, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said upcoming versions would include new features to make it easier for the community to detect inaccuracies and verify whether articles were written by a credible source.  But he said the open nature of Wikipedia meant errors would never be completely eliminated - they would simply be removed faster.  Read more here (from The Age).