Legal Definitions - screening committee

Screen-Scraping

Screen-scraping refers to the practice of automatically extracting information that is visibly displayed on one website and then presenting that data on a different website. This process typically involves software that reads the visual layout and content of a webpage, much like a human user would, rather than accessing the website's underlying data through official programming interfaces (APIs) or direct database connections. Because it bypasses the intended methods of data access, screen-scraping can sometimes raise legal concerns, particularly regarding copyright infringement of the original website's content.

• Example 1: A Travel Price Comparison Site

  Imagine a new travel website that promises to find you the absolute lowest prices for hotels. Instead of partnering with hotels or using their official data feeds, this website uses automated tools to visit hundreds of individual hotel chain websites, read the prices and availability displayed on their booking pages, and then lists those prices on its own platform. This is screen-scraping because it's taking information directly from what's visible on the hotel websites' screens and republishing it.

• Example 2: A Job Aggregator Platform

  A startup creates a job search engine that aims to list every available job posting online. To achieve this, their system regularly visits the career sections of thousands of company websites, reads the job titles, descriptions, and application links as they appear on those pages, and then compiles them into a searchable database on the startup's own website. This method of gathering data by "reading" the displayed content of other sites is a form of screen-scraping.

• Example 3: A Product Review and Price Tracking Tool

  Consider a browser extension that helps consumers track product prices and read reviews across various online retailers. When a user visits a product page on a major e-commerce site, the extension might automatically "scrape" the product's current price, its average customer rating, and key specifications directly from the visible webpage content. It then displays this aggregated information to the user, often comparing it with data scraped from other retailers, without directly accessing the retailers' internal product databases.