"MySpace mom" Lori Drew has had her misdemeanor guilty verdict overturned by the federal judge handling the case, the LA Times reports. Violating a web site`s terms of use is not, it seems, a federal crime after all.

Horrible things aren`t always crimes

The guilty verdict against Lori Drew, prosecutors crowed, would send an "overwhelming message" to online bullies. Though she escaped conviction on felony charges, the 49-year-old Missouri mom could have still faced three years in prison or fines of up to $300,000 for launching an online harassment campaign that ended in the suicide of a teenage neighbor. Drew was due to be sentenced today.

But the "message," legal observers worried, may be that anyone who uses a Web site without paying close attention to those ubiquitous Terms of Service risks committing a federal crime. The judge shared those concerns.

One of the recently leaked builds of Windows 7 (if you`re one to keep up with this sort of thing, the latest is build 7264) has more juice in it than just a new default wallpaper. In the Windows 7 Home Premium edition, the Microsoft Software License Terms has an additional clause that talks about a Family Pack licensing plan that would cover up to three computers in a household. This is no accident: other editions like Professional and Ultimate do not contain the Family Pack wording. 

Here`s the whole clause:

Behavioral advertising, in which users are fed ads based on the interests revealed by their Web browsing habits, has an obvious appeal to advertisers, as it will ostensibly allow them to serve ads to the most relevant audiences. It also raises a host of privacy concerns—to work effectively, the Web surfing histories of consumers have to be aggregated and analyzed by those providing the ads. 

Both the Federal Trade Commission and Congress have asked questions about whether advertisers were doing enough to protect and inform consumers, raising the prospect that regulation of behavioral advertising was only a matter of time. In an attempt to head off the government, a coalition of advertising groups that includes Google has now issued a series of principles that will guide their self-regulation.

The industry didn`t need to look far to see the downsides of a failure to respond to public concerns. One of the more aggressive approaches to behavioral advertising, the deep packet inspection used by NebuAd, saw the company`s CEO dragged before Congress, and the resulting bad publicity turned the company into a pariah. It ultimately closed its doors last month.