Inside the role of collective licensing with CLA’s Chief Executive Simon Hutson
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Photo: © DACS
From books and magazines to reports, research and teaching materials, visual work is copied, scanned and shared every day. For artists, photographers and estates, that everyday reuse can be an important - and often unseen - source of income.
In this interview, we speak to Simon Hutson, the newly appointed Chief Executive of the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA), about how collective licensing helps turn large‑scale copying into royalty payments for freelancers and rightsholders, including those paid through DACS Payback. We discuss why this still matters in a digital world, how visual creators can be better recognised when their work is reused, and what CLA’s role is in making sure the system remains trusted, transparent and fair for artists, estates and the wider creative industries.
For a freelance creator (artist, photographer, illustrator) - what’s the simplest way to explain what CLA does for them?
In a nutshell, CLA helps ensure that authors, publishers and visual artists are remunerated when their work is reused.
Everyday, organisations across workplaces, education and public sector copy, scan, share and store published content that include visual works – from photographs in magazines, to illustrations in reports, books or on websites. It would be almost impossible for an individual creator to licence and track every one of those uses themselves.
Collective licensing solves this problem by providing organisations with a blanket licence tailored to its sector, permitting them to reuse published content aspart of their day-to-day work. These licences ensure that content is reused lawfully and that the value for the reuse flows back to the rightsholders and creators through royalty payments.
For freelance creators, that means income from uses of their work that might otherwise be invisible.
Many creators only hear about royalties when a payment lands. What do you want them to understand about the day-to-day work behind that?
A royalty payment is the end result of a huge amount of work that happens behind the scenes all year round.
At CLA, we invest in our people and our technology to capture as much evidence of what content people are copying and sharing, so that we can distribute royalties for DACS' members as accurately as possible. This includes a continuous cycle of data collection activities with customers across all sectors, capturing over 900,000 copying events a year, followed by an annual distribution process where we match DACS' members claims with the titles our customers are using.
For visual artists this is especially important because the value often sits withing a wider publication, such as a book, journal, magazine or report.
Our role is to make that matching process as accurate, robust and transparent as possible so that royalties are distributed on the strongest evidence base available.
What are the biggest barriers to making sure visual creators are properly recognised and paid when their work appears in publications?
One of the biggest challenges is visibility. Unlike written works, visual content isn’t always consistently credited or linked back to the creator once it’s embedded within a publication, which can make attribution more difficult, particularly in digital environments where content is frequently reshared or reformatted.
There’s also the issue of scale. Visual works can appear across thousands of publications and platforms, and no individual creator could realistically track all of that reuse themselves.
Alongside that, awareness can be a barrier, both in terms of organisations understanding when permission is needed, and creators knowing how to claim for reuse or whether their work qualifies.
That’s where collective licensing plays an important role, helping to bridge the gap between widespread reuse and ensuring creators are fairly recognised and paid.
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CLA’s systems work well for publication identifiers like ISBNs, but visual works don’t always have universal identifiers. How are you thinking about improving visibility for images and visual creators?
This is a great question and it is a challenge. There are some technologies we are looking at which leverage proprietary AI models (interestingly currently used to detect synthetic content in financial imagery and deep fakes) to track provenance but we don’t think anyone has cracked this one yet.
What do you think success around Collective Licensing would look like for creators and rightsholders a year from now?
Success would mean collective licensing has kept pace with how content is being used today, particularly in the context of generative AI.
A year from now, we’d want to see real progress in ensuring that when content is used to train or power AI systems, that use is recognised and fairly remunerated, in a way that reflects real-world usage at scale.
It would also mean collective licensing expanding decisively into new areas, giving creators and rightsholders confidence that their work is protected and valued, even as technology evolves.
Ultimately, success is about making sure the principles of fair recognition and payment continue to hold true, no matter how or where content is used.
What role do you think collective licensing can play in reducing the “admin burden” that often falls on rightsholders?
This is at the heart of why collective licensing exists, because the alternative is every creator individually tracking, licensing and chasing payments for every instance of reuse, which would be completely unmanageable.
For a freelance photographer or illustrator, the time and cost of doing that alone would outweigh any income generated.
CLA takes on the complexity of licensing thousands of organisations, collecting the data and distributing the funds, so that creators and rightsholders don’t have to.
My ambition is to build on this and continue to make it as seamless as possible over time, and that a creator's engagement with the system is as simple as registering their works and receiving what they're owed, with as little friction in between as possible.
CLA’s work connects everyday reuse of content (in workplaces, education, public bodies) to royalties for creators. Why do you think this is especially important for freelancers who don’t have salaries or retainers?
For a freelancer, every revenue stream matters and unlike salaried employees, there's no guaranteed baseline to fall back on when commissions are slow or a client delays payment. Royalties from collective licensing can be genuinely meaningful precisely because they're not tied to a single client relationship or project. They arrive as recognition of work already done, often work the creator has long moved on from. That kind of passive, recurring income, even if modest in any given year, has real value to someone whose earnings are inherently variable.
It's also a matter of principle. The work created by freelancers is what makes the content that organisations copy so valuable. They deserve to share in that.
What do you see as CLA’s responsibility to keep the collective licensing mechanism trusted, so that creators believe the system works for them?
CLA’s role is simple, but significant. Trust ultimately comes down to delivery, making sure the system works in practice, not just in principle. This is something that CLA has been doing effectively for decades.
Creators need to see that the system works in practice, not just in principle. That means payments that are fair, transparent, and reflective of real-world use, including as new areas like generative AI develop. Our responsibility is to keep that system robust, relevant, and delivering consistently.
What would you like artist estates to understand about licensing, reuse and royalties - particularly where works circulate widely in books, journals and digital publications?
I'd want estates to understand that the circulation of an artist's work doesn't stop generating value after their death, and neither should the royalties. If a late artist's images appear in academic journals, art history textbooks, or educational materials that are being copied across institutions, there are mechanisms to ensure the estate is recognised and remunerated for that.
The works of significant artists can circulate very widely, often more widely after their death than before, and estates deserve to benefit from that. I'd encourage any estate managing a body of visual work to make sure they're connected to DACS and understand what they may be entitled to claim.
What’s one action a creator can take to improve the chances their work is properly recognised in licensing and distribution systems?
Firstly, join DACS – but that’s obvious. Building on that it helps a lot if DACS have as much information as possible to help CLA distribute money effectively. What we do each year is take the titles artists' have claimed, and match them with the titles we have found in data collection that year so data integrity is crucial.
We’re at a moment of significant change in how content is created, shared and reused. What excites you most about leading CLA through this next chapter?
CLA is in a strong position because it already solves a problem that is becoming more important.
It brings together rights at scale and makes them usable in a way that works for both creators and users. That model has worked well across education, public sector and large enterprises for many years.
What is changing now is the level and type of demand for content. New technologies are driving a need for large volumes of high-quality material, and there is growing pressure to ensure that access to that material is properly structured.
That creates a clear opportunity. CLA can take what it already does well and extend it into areas that are developing quickly, where there is a genuine need for practical solutions.
There is also a very real need from creators. Many do not have the scale or leverage to engage directly with large technology companies. Collective approaches give them a way to participate in a market they would otherwise struggle to access.
That combination of proven capability and new demand makes this a particularly interesting moment.
From your perspective, what is the biggest risk facing visual creators if licensing and copyright frameworks don’t keep pace with how content is now used?
The risk is that creators become increasingly disconnected from the value their work generates.
If frameworks do not keep up, content will continue to be used widely without permission or payment, and the economic benefit will sit elsewhere. Over time, that reduces the incentive to create.
Visual creators are especially exposed. Their work is easy to extract, easy to reuse and highly valuable in this environment, but it is also harder to track and attribute. That makes it more likely to be used without any clear link back to the creator.
If that continues, it affects the whole system. Fewer people are able to sustain creative work, and the overall quality and diversity of content starts to decline.
A functioning market depends on a clear relationship between use and reward. Licensing provides a way to maintain that relationship, even as the ways content is used continue to evolve.
Finally, if we can ask you to finish this sentence, what would you say: “Creators should care about collective licensing because…”
… it turns the principle of copyright into something tangible, ensuring that when your work is reused, including in emerging areas like generative AI, it is recognised, valued, and paid for. Collective licensing is especially powerful in AI as most AI companies do not want to sign 50 deals to get 50 content sources – collective licensing removes that friction.
About the author
Simon Hutson is the new Chief Executive Officer at The Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA), with over 20 years of experience in senior leaderships roles at organisations such as the BBC, Reuters and Cision,
