One charge dropped in Pirate Bay trial

In today's podcast: One charge dropped in Pirate Bay trial; Verizon to launch LTE in US; and Facebook backtracks on usage policy.

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A Swedish prosecutor on Tuesday dropped a charge levied against four men on trial for running The Pirate Bay, one of the most popular BitTorrent search engines and trackers on the Internet.

Tuesday's proceedings saw Swedish prosecutor Hakan Roswall drop a charge of aiding in the making of copies of works under copyright. The charge was dropped due to the inability of the prosecution to prove copies of content were made. One charge -- essentially aiding the making of material under copyright available -- remains. The defendants could face prison time. Swedish authorities want them to forfeit 1.2 million Swedish kronor (US$140,000) in advertising revenue generated from the site. The Motion Picture Association is seeking 93 million Swedish kronor in damages, and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry is seeking [euro]1.6 million euros b(US$2.06 million) in damages.

Facebook has removed language for its terms of use that appeared to give the company vast, perpetual control over any data posted to the social-networking site. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog that based on feedback the company was getting, it felt it was best to return to the old terms of service while it works on a new user agreement. The ruckus started after a blog post last Sunday on The Consumerist that highlighted a change in Facebook policy that allowed it to maintain broad control and archive data that users had deleted. Under the previous terms of use, Facebook was not granted any rights to deleted material. The NEW terms prompted concerns that Facebook could, for example, harvest a deleted photo and use it in promotional material. Zuckerberg wrote it will take the company a few weeks to revise the service terms, saying the new agreement will be clearly written and incorporate suggestions from Facebook users

Verizon said Wednesday it will start to roll out its LTE network in two cities in the U.S. late this year, and then expand to 25 to 30 markets in 2010. The network will be built using radio equipment from Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson. Trials of LTE, which Verizon has done with Vodafone in Europe and the U.S., have shown speeds of up to 80Mbps, according to Dick Lynch, Verizon executive vice president and CTO. But what matters most is the average speed, and that is not yet known, according to Lynch. The first users of LTE will be laptop users, who will see improvements in speed over EV-DO networks, according to Lynch, and he expects the first smartphones to show up in mid-2011.

Perhaps pre-alpha was a bit too early for Mozilla to release its Fennec mobile browser for Windows Mobile. Early adopters who downloaded the application after it was announced Feb. 10 found it essentially doesn't work. The episode doesn't bode well for Mozilla, which has already faltered with previous mobile browsing efforts and is lagging behind competitors including Opera, Apple's Safari and IE Mobile, which are securing footholds among mobile users. For many people who tried Fennec on Windows Mobile, the browser loaded only a checkerboard pattern image any time they tried to open a Web page. Mozilla developers suspect the problem is related to restrictions that Windows Mobile puts on memory use. Fennec developers are working on ways to get around those restrictions to solve the problem, they said.

And those are the top headlines from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought t you by the IDG News Service. I'm Marc Ferranti in the New York bureau. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.