DACS is delighted to announce that the share of royalties owed to visual artists through the collective licensing scheme operated by the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) and the Newspaper Licensing Agency’s (NLA) licensing scheme called NLA Media Access has increased on average from 8% to 8.7%. Read more here.

This independent determination follows almost a year long valuation process involving the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS), the Artists’ Collecting Society (ACS), the British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies (BAPLA), the Publishers Licensing Society (PLS), and DACS.

The valuation process set out to determine how revenues for copying text and images in UK publications like books, journals and magazines should be transparently and fairly split between the different rightsholders.

The valuation process was a result of a dispute earlier in the year between DACS and the CLA and its owners PLS and ALCS regarding the longstanding agreement between DACS and the CLA to collect collective licensing revenues from its scheme. This led to a successful mediation process where DACS and the CLA signed an interim agreement to guarantee royalties distributed through the DACS Payback scheme to rightsholders in visual works for the 2015 and 2016 distribution years.

DACS is very pleased with the result of the determination and the increase in value of the share of collective licensing revenues for visual artists. The process and final determination will ensure that all rightsholders will receive fair remuneration for the secondary use of their work.

DACS distributes royalties collected from a variety of collective licensing schemes, the main one being the CLA, to visual artists through our annual Payback scheme. Payback is a well-established scheme that DACS has run for almost fifteen years and in 2015 we distributed almost £4.7 million in Payback royalties to over 25,000 visual artists.