AOL Unit Runs Napster-Like Search Engine

While Time Warner is suing two Internet companies for providing online searches that allow music fans to download pirated music off the Web, a subsidiary of its soon-to-be merger partner America Online is running the same kind of Napster-like service.

But after considering the piracy implications, AOL said late Wednesday it will shut off the search engine in the next few days, and acknowledged there was no way for the search tool to distinguish between legitimate and illegal music files.

“Until we can figure out how to address [the issue], we’re going to have to take the search function down,” said Jim Whitney, an AOL spokesman.

The AOL search engine is run by Nullsoft Inc., a San Francisco-based company that makes a popular software program called Winamp that plays digital music files on personal computers.

As part of a recent campaign to attract consumers to its Winamp.com Web site, Nullsoft unveiled a search engine that scans the Web for digital music files.

Consumers can type in the name of an artist--whether it’s Metallica or Britney Spears--and the search engine finds and indexes links to copyrighted recordings by these performers, regardless of whether the musicians had given their permission to offer their tunes free on the Net.

On Wednesday, a quick search pulled up scores of links to popular tunes by Dr. Dre, Metallica, Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys.

Nullsoft’s foray into music piracy could have larger ramifications than merely an embarrassing public-relations situation for both AOL and Time Warner, legal experts said.

“It plays into the idea of having unclean hands, that you raise copyright issues in a lawsuit but are also guilty of engaging in the same sort of action,” said Anthony Berman, a San Francisco-based entertainment attorney who specializes in new-media issues. “You saw AOL do something very similar with Gnutella.”

Indeed, Nullsoft’s search engine is strikingly similar to search functions of Scour Inc. and MP3Board.com, which Time Warner’s Warner Bros. Music is suing.

In late June, Warner Bros. joined several other major record labels to sue MP3Board for providing links to copyrighted materials. And in July, Hollywood’s largest film studios teamed up with the major record companies and music publishers to file suit against Scour, a Beverly Hills new-media venture backed by former super-agent Michael Ovitz. The complaint lumps both Scour’s Web search engine with its Napster-like file-sharing tool, Scour Exchange.

“It’s ironic that the plaintiffs in our lawsuit are currently offering the same thing we are,” said Dan Rodrigues, president of Scour. “We haven’t talked to our attorneys about this, but we will as soon as possible.”

On Wednesday, Scour announced that its legal team will include renowned Harvard law professor Arthur R. Miller, trial lawyer Fred Bartlit and intellectual property rights author Peter Toren.

AOL’s problems started last spring. In March, Winamp employees created the core technology behind Gnutella, a file-sharing tool that takes the Napster concept one step further. It allows users to trade any kind of file, whether it’s music, video or text.

Nullsoft employees posted the program’s code briefly on the Internet, but AOL deemed the program an “unauthorized freelance project” and yanked the data offline.

But it was too late. Like a computer virus, Gnutella spread everywhere within hours and developers are continuing the effort outside AOL’s control. Hundreds of Web sites provide Internet users access to the software and insight about the latest developments.

“What you’re seeing is a situation with a rift between the technology and media industries, where they have extremely opposite interests on copyright,” said Malcolm Maclachlan, a new-media analyst who tracks online music and entertainment for the research group IDC. “The difference between Napster and what you could do with Winamp are very small.”

In addition to the search engine, Nullsoft also operates a site where people can store their MP3 files. This digital locker system is built into the Winamp MP3 player, making it simple for consumers to store and organize their bootleg tunes.

Officials with Nullsoft and Time Warner could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

The brouhaha about Winamp, however, is just among the first of AOL’s ongoing struggles to solve the file-sharing controversy.

Recently, a group of independent programmers has launched a Napster-like file-sharing program--called Aimster--that lets people trade music and video files over AOL’s instant-messaging service.

The software tool allows people to trade files through America Online’s AIM service, which has 64 million users to date.

Like Napster and Gnutella, Aimster provides a search and retrieval function so people can swap files with one another.