Legal Definitions - extraction

Extraction, in the context of intellectual property and data management, refers to the act of copying or transferring data from a database, typically residing on a server, to a separate computer system, storage device, or digital format. It is crucial to understand that this process creates a duplicate of the data; the original information remains intact within the source database and is not removed.

Here are some examples illustrating the concept of extraction:

• Academic Research: A university researcher needs to analyze specific climate data from a global environmental database hosted on a university server. They download a subset of this data, such as temperature readings for a particular region over 20 years, onto their personal workstation to run statistical models. This action is an extraction because the researcher is copying a portion of the data from the central environmental database (on its server) to their own computer (a different medium/computer) for further processing. The original climate database still retains all its data, including the subset that was copied.

• Business Operations: A marketing team at an e-commerce company wants to send a special promotion to customers who have purchased a specific product category in the last six months. They use a tool to export a list of these customers' names and email addresses from the company's main customer relationship management (CRM) database into a spreadsheet file saved on a shared network drive. This constitutes extraction because customer data is being copied from the company's central CRM database (residing on a server) to a separate spreadsheet file (a different digital format and medium) on a network drive. The full customer database remains unchanged and accessible.

• Legal Discovery: During a lawsuit, a law firm requests specific financial transaction records from a bank. The bank's IT department generates a report containing the requested transactions from its secure banking database and saves it as a password-protected PDF file on an encrypted USB drive, which is then provided to the law firm. This is an extraction because specific financial data is copied from the bank's primary database (on its server) to a new, separate medium (the encrypted USB drive containing a PDF file). The bank's original database continues to hold all its transaction records, including those that were copied for discovery.