By JOE MANDAK, Associated Press Writer
Wed Apr 12, 6:31 PM ET

PHILADELPHIA - An ongoing lawsuit between a company and a popular archive of Web pages raises questions about whether the archive unavoidably violates copyright laws while providing a valuable service, experts say.

The nonprofit Internet Archive was created in 1996 to preserve Web pages that will eventually be deleted or changed. More than 55 billion pages are stored there.

A health care company claims the archive didn't do enough to protect copyright information that a competing firm accessed to defend itself in a lawsuit.

That information didn't factor into a judge's decision to dismiss a trademark violation claim against the competing company, but the attorney for Healthcare Advocates Inc. of Philadelphia, which filed the trademark claim, is suing the Internet Archive anyway.

The archive "is just like a big vacuum cleaner, sucking up information and making it available" to anyone with a Web browser, said Scott S. Christie, an attorney representing Healthcare Advocates.

The company filed the lawsuit last year in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia. Before the trademark claim was dismissed, the company learned that opposing attorneys had used the archive to access old versions of Healthcare Advocates' Web site — presumably to help the competitors' case.

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