DACS Payback Assistant

Making your DACS claim easier – automated help identifying your work in the media. Don’t lose out any longer!

• Is your work in documentaries, archive programmes or history series that are repeated without anyone telling you?
• Do you make a DACS Payback claim each year? If not -why not?
• Is it a total PITA??!
• Do you worry you are missing stuff you could have claimed for?
• Are you an agent, estate or small agency compiling claims for several people at once?

DACS Payback pays photographers, artists and illustrators each year for the secondary use of their work – repeat television broadcasts among them. The catch is that you can only claim for what you can identify, and most people find out their work has been shown again by accident: a friend mentions a repeat, or you stumble across it in the listings months later. By the time the claim window opens, the evidence has gone cold. So you end up losing out on money that is rightfully yours.

InterXmedia has developed software that does the looking for you. It reads the UK television schedules every week, checks them against your own list of names and keywords, and emails you any likely candidates – with the matched text, the channel and the broadcast date.

What it does

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  Weekly schedule monitoring – every programme in the UK EPG schedule for the upcoming week is checked against your keywords: titles, synopses and credit text. 

• Weighted keywords/phrases – each keyword carries its own weighting, from “worth a look” to “dead cert”. You set the threshold; only matches that clear it reach your inbox.
• Full history – every match is kept and searchable by channel, title or date, so you can go back over a whole claim period in one sitting.
• Multiple claimants – an agency, an estate or a group of collaborators can run separate keyword lists and separate alert schedules under one account, with access granted per person. Nothing is shared between claimants except the underlying schedule data.

How it works in practice

1. We create an account for you on the system
2. You enter the keywords and phrases you want searched for and attach a weighting to each one.
3. The software checks the television listings every week and compiles a weighted list of programmes matching your list.
4. You receive a weekly email with the top matches, so you can record or watch any relevant programmes or just attach them to your claim. You can also review the whole year’s list online

COMING SOON – Publications too…
We are also extending the software to monitor magazine and periodical issues as they are published, utilising the same personalised keyword list (but with its own weightings). 
You can watch a demo of the system, including both TV and publication search, here
NB: the TV search is live and works for anyone wanting to track any topic, but the publication search is still under development and is currently limited to just popular music publications – so only useful for tracking those

Who is it for?

Any photographer, illustrator, artist or visual creator who makes an annual DACS Payback claim – and the agents, estates and picture libraries who make claims on their behalf.

DACS Payback is administered independently by the Design and Artists Copyright Society. interXmedia is not affiliated with DACS.