Can anyone verify this?

I heard that the major search engines are (supposedly) implementing systems that will penalise links in footers and headers i.e paid links.

Can anyone tell me if this is true?

If you are talking about links that will appear sitewide in your forums and headers? Most likely.

How so ATNO?

If they were to implement something like that, commercial sites that make money by actually selling things would go up in the rankings, and sites like mine, that actually provide information, would go down, simply because I have an ad in my header that allows me to make a bit of scratch to pay for my hosting.

Don't get me wrong, I try to make money from my site, but I actually provide a service to my users, and if they're going to penalize me for putting a banner ad in my header so the site supports itself, that's just wrong. I have to disagree on this, I doubt anything like this will happen. It's to general and has the potential to backfire.

I agree with ScienceofSpock that anything like this will happen...