Half of the charges made against the four men behind the notorious file-sharing website The Pirate Bay have been sensationally dropped on day two of the trial.

Prosecutor Håkan Roswall made the surprise move this morning, according to reports on The Local and TorrentFreak.

He has amended the charges against Carl Lundström, Peter Sunde, Frederik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg by removing all mention of “complicity in the production of copyrighted material” from the charge sheet filed with the district court in Stockholm, Sweden.

The new charges will be changed simply to read “complicity to make (copyrighted material) available”, thereby limiting it to the production of the actual torrent file and the resultant hard or soft copy of it.

Defence lawyer Per Samuelsson described the amendment as “a sensation”.

“It is very rare that you win half the case after one and a half days and it is clear that the prosecutor has been deeply affected by what we said yesterday,” he said.

Samuelsson also claimed that Roswall “has not really understood” the BitTorrent technology used by The Pirate Bay.

A common blood-pressure drug can selectively dampen fearful memories, according to research published today in Nature Neuroscience.

The findings add support for a new approach to treating anxiety disorders: chemically blocking the emotional component of a memory as it is being recalled. In healthy volunteers, the drug was more effective than exposure therapy, one of the most common treatments for anxiety disorders, which involves repeatedly exposing patients to what they fear.

The research builds on preliminary tests in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), in which people who have experienced severe trauma, such as rape, are plagued by disturbing and uncontrollable memories of the event.

A few days’ testing of Windows 7 has already disclosed some draconian DRM, some of it unrelated to media files.

A legitimate copy of Photoshop CS4 stopped functioning after we clobbered a nagging registration screen by replacing a DLL with a hacked version.

With regard to media files, the days of capturing an audio program on your PC seem to be over (if the program originated on that PC). The inputs of your sound card are severely degraded in software if the card is also playing an audio program (tested here with Grooveshark). This may be the tip of the iceberg.

Being in bed with the RIAA is bad enough, but locking your own files away from you is a tactic so outrageous it may kill the OS for many persons. Many users will not want to experiment with a second sound card or computer just to record from online sources, or boot up under a Linux that supports ntfs-3g just to control their files.”

Read on for more details of this user’s findings.

Adobe Systems, which popularized the use of video and animation on the Web, is introducing a new version of its Flash software that runs not only on computers but also on the latest high-end mobile phones.

Adobe, which makes Acrobat, Flash and Photoshop software, plans to bring a full PC version of its Flash video player to smartphones next year, but has no imminent deal to announce for Apple’s influential iPhone, it said.

With such a move, Adobe will allow developers to design visually rich software that works on smartphones just as it does on computers — eliminating the common and frustrating experience of files appearing in garbled form on phones.

The company will be previewing its Flash Player 10 for smartphones at this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the industry’s biggest annual gathering.