 The court did not accept the argument that Accolade's games competed directly with Sega's, noting that there was no proof that any of Accolade's published games had diminished the market for any of Sega's games.Despite claims from Sega's attorneys that the company had invested much time and effort into developing the Genesis, and that Accolade was capitalizing on this time and energy, the court rejected these claims under the notion that the console was largely functional, and its functional principles were not protected under the Copyright Act of 1976.On the matter of reverse engineering as a process, the court concluded that "where disassembly is the only way to gain access to the ideas and functional elements embodied in a copyrighted computer program and where there is a legitimate reason for seeking such access, disassembly is a fair use of the copyrighted work, as a matter of law."