Common use of Screen Scraping Clause in Contracts

Screen Scraping. Screen scraping is normally associated with the programmatic collection of visual data from a source. Originally, screen scraping referred to the practice of reading text data from a computer display terminal’s screen. This involves reading the terminal's memory through its auxiliary port, or by connecting the terminal output port of one computer system to an input port on another. The term screen scraping is synonymous with the term bidirectional exchange of data. A screen scraper might connect to a legacy system via Telnet, emulate the keystrokes needed to navigate the legacy user interface, process the resulting display output, extract the desired data, and pass it on to a modern system. More modern screen scraping techniques include capturing the bitmap data from a screen and running it through an optical character reader engine, or in the case of graphical user interface applications, querying the graphical controls by programmatically obtaining references to their underlying programming objects.