I can setup a telnet connection in Perl no problems, and have just discovered Curses, and am wondering if I can use the two together to scrape the output from the telnet ses
Curses does the opposite. It is a C library for optimising screen updates from a program writing to a terminal, originally designed to be used over a slow serial connection. It has no ability to scrape a layout from a sequence of control characters.
A better bet would be a terminal emulator that has an API with the ability to do this type of screen scraping. Off the top of my head I'm not sure if any Open-source terminal emulators do this, but there are certainly commercial ones available that can.