I don't know the full etymology, but I first heard the term "screen scraping" about 15 years ago in the context of writing a web application that interfaced wit

I don't know the full etymology, but I first heard the term "screen scraping" about 15 years ago in the context of writing a web application that interfaced with a mainframe application. The mainframe database was not directly accessible to the webapp platform, so instead a session was opened to the mainframe over telnet, and the web application itself issued commands over that telnet session, parsed the terminal output, and dynamically generated a web UI that displayed the data or form fields or what have you. Scraping these days may more often be a means of extracting data to an offsite cache/database, but ad-hoc on-demand scraping is consistent with the definition. Regardless, this doesn't really matter. I don't see how any restrictions on "scraping" can possibly be enforced. Screen reader programs that allow visually impaired individuals to browse the web are "scraping". Mobile browsers that reformat pages on the fly to optimize their display on a small screen are "scraping". Ad-hoc user-initiated scraping of this sort is really no different than just browsing the web directly. So whether one wants to argue that "scraping" is or isn't happening here, it hardly matters to whether this is ethical, and should not matter to whether it is legal (although on that topic, I'm guessing different judges would see it differently).