Earn through licensing your work
In 2022, DACS secured a total of £1.4 million for the artists, creators and beneficiaries we represent worldwide through our licensing service. We handle the client negotiations and licensing process, protect your rights, and collect royalties for you.
DACS streamlines the set-up of licensing agreements, and represents over 90,000 artists. We're often a picture editor’s first thought when they need artistic copyright clearance.
Are you eligible?
- Do you own the copyright in your artworks?
- Can you confirm that you haven't granted any exclusive rights to use your work to anyone else?
- Do you receive regular requests for your work to be reproduced?
DACS Licensing service is for visual art copyright holders who do not already have copyright licensing representation from an agent, gallery or image library.
It’s separate from DACS ARR and DACS Payback. You may already receive royalty payments from us through those services. That does not mean that we manage your copyright. Check which DACS services you’re a member of by emailing: membership@dacs.org.uk
Licensing vs assigning copyright
Licensing means you are paid for use of your work and remain in control of its usage. Assigning copyright to someone else means you give them full control of its usage. You lose your author rights and you will not receive any royalty payments for print, digital or broadcasting usage of the work.
As an artist or creator working for someone else, this can make a big difference to what you will get for what you create.
Artists, be wary of licensing your work ‘in perpetuity’ – this means forever, or on an ‘exclusive basis’. This would disallow anyone else, even yourself, from sharing, reproducing or distributing it.
Join DACS Licensing
Register your interest in our licensing service for artists and beneficiaries, and be connected with people looking for quality works to reproduce.
Our quality criteria
You can be assured that for any uses of your work:
- colour is reproduced as faithfully as possible
- it is not manipulated or subjected to any derogatory treatment
- cites the title of your work accurately
- credits you as the artist of the work
How it works
- When you join DACS Licensing service, you sign a membership agreement that clearly explains how we’ll manage the licensing of your work.
- Clients use our online licensing request form to get in touch with us about licensing your work. If requests come to you directly, these can be sent onto our Licensing Team to take forward for you.
- We negotiate the terms of the request and agree a royalty fee, based on the reach and commerciality of the use.
- Once approved, we arrange a licence with the client, clearly agreeing the terms of the use.
- We then invoice and collect the royalty fee due to you.
We pay out licensing royalties four times a year and you’ll receive a statement each time we pay you.
Our fees
Joining DACS Licensing service is free. As we’re not-for-profit, we retain a percentage of the royalties we collect on your behalf to cover our costs.
For royalties collected in the UK we deduct 25% and for royalties collected from overseas we deduct 15%.