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Varied Rulings on 'Screen Scraping'
The courts continue to wrestle with how to map existing law onto the shifting terrain of computer technology. And it appears that new controversies are arising faster than judicial consensus can form. One of the latest controversies surrounds “screen scraping,” a process by which a software program simulates a user's interaction with a Web site to access information stored on that site. A screen scraper not only can enter the information a human user would, but also can capture the Web site's replies. This facility may include the ability to extract substantial portions of data stored on the site ' and therein lies the beginning of the controversy.
Many users welcome scrapers. Scrapers can permit a user to enter certain information once, such as user names and passwords. With the push of a button, the scraper software is sent off to access various third-party Web sites to which the user subscribes, automatically input the appropriate information, and retrieve the desired information from these sites. This relieves the user from having to endure the tedium of individually accessing each Web site and manually and serially entering in repetitive information.
Controversy arises, however, when commercial entities use scraping software to collect substantial amounts of information from their competitors' Web sites, even when the information is provided to the public and is readily obtainable by manual means by individual inquiry. Several courts have addressed a company's use of such related technologies as “spiders,” “robots,” and “Web crawlers” to gather information from a competitor's Web site.
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