 Before 1974, when the US Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU) decided that ""computer programs, to the extent that they embody an author's original creation, are proper subject matter of copyright"", software was not copyrightable and therefore always in public domain.This legislation, plus court decisions such as "Apple v. Franklin" in 1983 for object code, clarified that the Copyright Act gave computer programs the copyright status of literary works.In the 1980s, a common way to share public-domain software was by receiving them through a local user group or a company like PC-SIG, of Sunnyvale, California, who maintained a mail-order catalog of more than 300 disks with an average price of US$6.