 Legally, the decision concurred that the nature of Accolade's work in reverse engineering the Sega Genesis was to access ideas that were deemed unprotected by copyright law, and could only be accessed by decompiling.By the verdict, the console's functional principles were established not to be protected by copyright, and that when no other means were available, reverse engineering the copyrighted software to access information about the console's functional principles is protected by the fair use doctrine.One such example of the precedent set by this case is "Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corporation", which cited "Sega v. Accolade" in deciding that reverse engineering the Sony PlayStation BIOS was protected by fair use and was non-exploitative.