Napster Inc. and AT&T Inc. said on Monday that they had agreed to a deal to provide some of the top U.S. phone company’s wireless and high-speed Internet customers with free digital music.

The service will be available beginning April 1 and will allow qualifying users unlimited access for one year to more than 3 million song tracks through Napster To Go. Those customers can transfer some tunes to compatible wireless phones and music devices.

Bruce Lehman, key architect of the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), has admitted that copyright protection law is failing.

The Clinton-era assistant secretary of commerce and commissioner of patents and trademarks put most of the blame for the DMCA’s shortcomings on the recording industry.

He said music industry “moguls” failed to adapt and create an attractive marketplace for music in the late 1990s. Recording industry execs had little idea about technology development and were reluctant to embrace new distribution technologies, Lehman argued.

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The California secretary of state’s office has shut down portions of its website after it was discovered it had been selling hundreds of thousands of public documents containing social security numbers and signatures, a practice that lasted for years. Several other states have also made available materials that reveal personal information, although it’s not clear which, if any, have curbed the policy.

The California secretary’s move came after a state assemblyman called attention to the practice of making Uniform Commercial Code documents, such as those memorializing loans, available online. A spokesman in Assemblyman Dave Jones’s office said of some two million UCC documents online, about one-third, or about 600,000, contained an individual’s name, address, social security number and often signature.

New Jersey drivers who insist on sending text messages on their cell phones or personal digital assistants may find themselves on the wrong side of the law if legislators approve a new bill.

The plan is in response to a recent Nationwide Insurance survey finding that one in five drivers are texting while driving, a figure that rises to about one in three among people aged 18 to 34, said Democratic Assemblyman Paul Moriarty.

“It’s extremely dangerous,” said Moriarty, one of three sponsors of the bill. “It requires you to completely take your eyes off the road. I see people driving down the street using both their thumbs to send a text message, and I can only imagine they are steering with their knees.”

Drivers caught texting would be fined between $100 and $250. Similar measures are being considered by three other states, Moriarty said.

Time Inc. said on Monday it would stop publishing Life, the iconic photography magazine that has been a weekly newspaper insert since 2004.

Although April 20 will be Life’s last print issue, the brand name will survive on the Internet, Time Inc., a unit of Time Warner Inc., said in a statement.

It is the latest magazine to shut down as more readers desert print publications for online news and photos.

“Growth requires taking risks, and the potential upside was huge, but unfortunately the timing worked against us,” Time Inc. Chief Executive Ann Moore said. “The market has moved dramatically since October 2004, and it is no longer appropriate to continue publication of Life as a newspaper supplement.”

Time is laying off 15 editorial workers and 27 in its business department in connection with the shutdown, said spokeswoman Dawn Bridges.

International Business Machines Corp. scientists plan to unveil a prototype chip on Monday that uses optical connections to increase the speed of moving data among chips to eight times that of previous technologies, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The chip’s speed, clocked at 160 billion bits of data a second, would allow a high-definition movie to be transmitted over a short distance in a fraction of a second, compared with the half-hour it takes over home broadband connections, IBM said in the Journal.