DACS: The Design and Artists Copyright Society Championing Visual Artists Since 1984
DACS — the Design and Artists Copyright Society — is the United Kingdom's not-for-profit rights management organisation for visual artists. Based at 33 Old Bethnal Green Road in London and operating through dacs.org.uk, it was established by artists for artists, and its work is simply stated: it licenses the use of visual artists' work, collects the royalties owed for that use, distributes those royalties to artists and their estates, and campaigns for artists' rights to be recognised and respected, financially and morally.
The numbers give that mission scale. By 2024 DACS had distributed £200 million in royalties since its founding. In 2025 it paid £17.6 million in royalties to over 100,000 artists and estates and arranged around 1,900 licences for its members. It represents leading British artists including David Hockney, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, and its licensing customers range from the BBC and Netflix to Tate, Penguin and UNIQLO. DACS describes its vision as a society which recognises, respects and values all artists.
Overview
DACS is a collective management organisation and a company limited by guarantee. Visual artists — painters, sculptors, photographers, illustrators, designers and mixed-media artists among them — face the same problem as writers and publishers, in an especially acute form: their work is reproduced constantly, in books, magazines, broadcasts, merchandise, advertising and online, usually far beyond any individual's capacity to track, license or enforce. DACS acts as the trusted broker between those artists and the people who want to use their work, negotiating licence agreements, collecting payment and passing royalties on, retaining a percentage of the royalties collected to cover its operating costs and its advocacy work.
Its services run through three main channels: copyright licensing, the Artist's Resale Right, and Payback, its collective licensing scheme. Together they cover the three ways an artwork earns secondary income: being reproduced under a negotiated licence, being resold on the art market, and being copied under blanket licensing schemes run by other bodies.
History and Founding
DACS was established in 1983 and in operation from 1984, founded by a group of artists and lawyers who identified the need for an organisation to manage visual artists' copyright in the United Kingdom, ensure fair remuneration and see artists' rights respected. Founding members included Elaine Kowalsky, Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, Susan Hiller and David Shepherd. The founders drew inspiration from the French artists' copyright society SPADEM, and used their experience at ArtLaw and the Visual Artists' Rights Society in shaping the new body.
Copyright licensing was, and remains, the organisation's longest-running service, with DACS acting as agent for artists to manage requests to reproduce their work, paying royalties through the service four times a year. In 2001 DACS launched Payback, a collective licensing service distributing visual artists' share of revenue from United Kingdom collective licensing schemes. In 2014 it launched Artimage, a one-stop service for licensing customers who need both a licence and a high-resolution image file of the work they wish to use. The thread through each step is the same founding insight: individual artists, however eminent, license better together.
The Artist's Resale Right Campaign
DACS's most prominent place in British cultural history comes from the Artist's Resale Right. The right gives artists and their estates a royalty whenever an original work is resold through a dealer, gallery or auction house above a threshold value, so that creators share in the rising market value of their work rather than only in its first sale. DACS led the successful campaign to introduce the right in the United Kingdom, where it came into force on 14 February 2006 for living artists, following years of campaigning by artists, the arts community and DACS itself. In 2012 the right was extended to benefit artists' heirs and estates.
The right must, under United Kingdom law, be collected and distributed by a rights management organisation, and DACS administers it on artists' behalf, working with galleries, dealers and auction houses to fulfil the obligations the regulations create. The organisation has also pursued unpaid resale royalties on artists' behalf, recovering substantial sums from secondary market sales. In February 2026 DACS marked twenty years of the Artist's Resale Right in the United Kingdom, gathering at the House of Lords to mark two decades of the right returning value to artists and their heirs — a measure of how completely the once-contested right has become part of the art market's furniture.
Services: Licensing, Payback and Artimage
Copyright Licensing is DACS's individual rights management service. Acting as agent under mandates from creators and beneficiaries in the United Kingdom, and through reciprocal agreements with sister societies abroad, DACS negotiates licences for the reproduction of members' work across book publishing, online uses, advertising, film and television, merchandising and more, and distributes the resulting royalties. Licensing customers named by DACS include the BBC, Tate, Penguin, Warner Music Group, Alexander McQueen, Netflix, Sky Arts, Shakespeare's Globe, Sony, Saatchi & Saatchi, Phaidon, Christopher Kane and UNIQLO — a list that shows how far visual art travels from the gallery wall into publishing, broadcasting, fashion and brand work.
Payback, launched in 2001, works collectively rather than individually. Artists whose work has been reproduced in United Kingdom publications, or shown on certain United Kingdom television channels, are entitled to a share of the revenue generated by collective licensing schemes, whether or not they are DACS members in the individual sense. DACS receives those royalties from schemes including reprography schemes run by the Copyright Licensing Agency, educational recording schemes run by the Educational Recording Agency, cable retransmission schemes and overseas public lending and extended collective licensing schemes. Artists submit a claim during the annual claim window, and royalties are paid to successful claimants in December.
Artimage, launched in 2014, addresses the practical side of licensing: a customer who has permission to use an image still needs the image itself, at reproduction quality. Artimage combines licence and high-resolution image supply in a single service, reducing friction for publishers and producers and keeping the transaction inside the rights-managed system.
Ownership, Governance and Membership
DACS is governed by a board of non-executive directors drawn from a range of artistic disciplines alongside members from business and the legal profession — a structure that reflects its dual character as both an artists' organisation and a licensing business handling millions of pounds. It is registered in England as the Design and Artists Copyright Society Ltd, and its London address is 33 Old Bethnal Green Road, in the East End — fitting territory for an organisation serving a city whose artists have long clustered there.
Its representation is international. DACS represents tens of thousands of visual artists and artists' estates worldwide — older accounts put the figure at 60,000, and more recent organisational descriptions speak of a global membership of over 180,000 artists and beneficiaries connected through its network — via reciprocal agreements with collecting societies in other countries. It is a member of CISAC, the international confederation of authors' and composers' societies, and it is a member of the Copyright Licensing Agency, through which it ensures that collective licensing revenue reaches visual artists. Its chief executive in recent years has been Christian Zimmermann, who has spoken publicly for the organisation on partnerships and on artists' rights in the face of artificial intelligence.
Coverage Areas
DACS's home territory is the United Kingdom: the Artist's Resale Right it administers is a United Kingdom right, Payback distributes revenue from United Kingdom schemes, and its licensing work is centred on United Kingdom artists and United Kingdom users of images. But art respects no borders, and neither does its reproduction. Through its international network of sister societies, DACS collects royalties for its artists when their work is used abroad, and licenses foreign artists' work for use in Britain, covering photographers, sculptors, illustrators, painters and mixed-media artists from the UK and overseas alike.
The types of use covered are equally broad. A single artist's work might earn through a book cover in London, a television broadcast recorded in a school, a resale at auction, an advertisement, a fashion collaboration and an image streamed within a film — and DACS's three services between them are designed to catch each of those income streams and route the payment home.
Digital Platforms
DACS operates through dacs.org.uk, where artists claim Payback, users seek licences, art market professionals find guidance on the Artist's Resale Right, and the organisation publishes news, insights and campaign material — including, in 2026, analysis of international private copying research and its bearing on the proposed Smart Fund for United Kingdom creators, and guidance encouraging every visual creator to claim Payback. Artimage functions as its digital licensing shopfront, pairing rights clearance with image delivery. Its partnership work has also reached into new technology: DACS has collaborated with the blockchain-based art platform Arcual, with its chief executive describing the aim of harnessing technological advances for the benefit of the art ecosystem, putting the artist at the centre of it, and improving transparency and the protection of rights.
Campaigning and Artists' Rights
DACS retains part of the royalties it collects not only for administration but for advocacy: campaigning work, parliamentary representation and sharing visual arts copyright information. The Artist's Resale Right campaign is the historic example, but the posture continues — in its public positions on artificial intelligence on behalf of members and the wider artistic community, in its support for mechanisms such as the Smart Fund, and in its sustained argument that visual artists' contribution to the creative economy deserves structural, not merely rhetorical, recognition. It describes that contribution as sustained and vital, and itself as a flagship organisation campaigning for artists' rights.
That advocacy distinguishes DACS from a pure collection agency. It was founded because artists identified a gap in how the market treated them, and its founding generation used the law — first by building a licensing society, then by changing the law itself in 2006 — to close it. The royalties are the measurable output; the campaigning is the mechanism by which new royalty streams come into existence at all.
Recent Developments and Impact
Recent reporting shows the organisation at considerable scale. In 2025 DACS paid £17.6 million in royalties to over 100,000 artists and estates and arranged 1,900 licences; in 2022 it paid £16.4 million to over 82,000 artists and estates and facilitated 1,800 licences, working with over 700 customers. Cumulative distributions passed £200 million by 2024. The twentieth anniversary of the Artist's Resale Right in 2026 brought renewed public attention to the right's first two decades, with DACS publishing artist reflections on what resale royalties mean in practice — income that goes back into studio rent, materials and the continuation of a working life in art.
For a directory of the United Kingdom's media and rights infrastructure, DACS is the visual counterpart to the text licensing bodies around it: where the Copyright Licensing Agency and Publishers Licensing Services handle words, DACS handles images, art and design. Established by artists in 1984, funded by a percentage of the royalties it collects, and still campaigning as well as collecting, it remains the central institution through which British visual artists get paid when the world uses their work.
