In a February 21, 2023 letter, the US Copyright Office cancelled the original registration for Zarya of the Dawn, a comic book with Midjourney images, and replaced it. The new registration covers Kristina Kashtanova's text and her selection and arrangement of text and images, but not the AI-generated images themselves.
Zarya of the Dawn is a short comic book. It became the first well-known test of how the US Copyright Office treats a work that mixes human writing with AI images. The Office's answer, in a letter dated February 21, 2023, still shapes every registration that involves AI.
This page tells the story and what it means for you. It is part of our section on AI, ownership and copyright, where you can find the broader rules and the decisions that followed.
01What happened
The facts come from the Copyright Office's letter, which sets out the record:
- September 15, 2022: Kristina Kashtanova applied to register Zarya of the Dawn, describing it as a "comic book." The application named her as the author and did not mention AI. The Office registered it the same day as VAu001480196.
- Shortly after: the Office learned of social media posts saying the comic had been made with Midjourney, an AI image service. The word "Midjourney" also appeared on the cover, without explanation.
- October 28, 2022: the Office wrote that it intended to cancel the registration unless she showed why it should stand.
- November 21, 2022: her lawyer replied. He argued she authored every part of the work, with Midjourney as a tool, or in the alternative that her text and her arrangement of the pages were protected.
- February 21, 2023: the Office gave its decision.
The comic has 18 pages, one of them a cover, combining her text with images she generated in Midjourney and arranged into panels.
02What the Office protected
The Office agreed with her second argument. It concluded that Kashtanova "is the author of the Work's text as well as the selection, coordination, and arrangement of the Work's written and visual elements." That authorship, the letter said, "is protected by copyright."
So the Office did not throw the whole work out. It cancelled the original certificate and issued a new one covering "the 'text' and the 'selection, coordination, and arrangement of text created by the author and artwork generated by artificial intelligence.'" Because what remained was mostly text, it was reregistered as an unpublished literary work. The new registration kept the original effective date of September 15, 2022.
The Office also left a door open. Where she had made substantive edits to an image in Photoshop, it said, "those edits could provide human authorship and would not be excluded from the new registration certificate."
03What it refused, and why
The Office found that "the images in the Work that were generated by the Midjourney technology are not the product of human authorship." Its reasoning turned on control. Midjourney users, the letter said, lack "sufficient control over generated images to be treated as the 'master mind' behind them." The reason was "the significant distance between what a user may direct Midjourney to create and the visual material Midjourney actually produces."
The Office drew a contrast with tools such as Photoshop. When artists use editing tools, they choose what to change and how. Midjourney users, the Office said, do not have comparable control over the image the system produces. Needing "hundreds of intermediate images" to get the result you want was, in its view, a sign of that gap rather than proof of authorship.
It also tested one specific edit. Kashtanova had changed the rendering of a character's lips and mouth. The Office called those changes "too minor and imperceptible to supply the necessary creativity for copyright protection." Small fixes to an AI image are not enough; the human changes must be creative in their own right.
04What changed after Zarya
Zarya was a single registration decision, but the Office turned its reasoning into general policy within weeks. Its registration guidance of March 16, 2023 cites the Zarya letter directly and sets the rule for everyone: claim the human-authored parts, describe and exclude AI material that is more than trivial, and correct earlier filings that did not.
The same approach runs through later decisions. In September 2023 the Review Board refused Jason Allen's Midjourney image after he declined to exclude the AI material. On January 29, 2025, the Office's Part 2 report on copyrightability confirmed that creative selection, arrangement and modification are protected, while prompts alone are not. Our summary of the Office's AI guidance in date order follows that thread, and our page on copyrighting AI content under the human test lists the other key cases.
05Lessons for creators
- Disclose up front. The trouble with Zarya started because the application did not mention AI. The Office learned of it from the internet. Our guide to disclosing AI material when you register shows the fields to use.
- Your words and your structure count. The story, the dialogue, and the choices about which image goes where were all protected.
- Edits must be real. Small touch-ups to an AI image did not count. Substantial, creative changes can.
- Keep your working files. The Office could not tell from the record how one image had been edited, so it could not credit that work. Layered files and version history would have helped.
- A cancelled registration is not the end. Kashtanova kept a registration, with its original date, for the parts she made.
Where the law is still moving
Zarya was decided on the facts of one comic and one tool as it worked in 2022. The Office has said its view of prompting could change if tools give users more control over the expressive result. Until then, Zarya remains the clearest example of how the Office splits a mixed work.
Sources
- Zarya of the Dawn (Registration # VAu001480196), cancellation decision letter
US Copyright Office · 21 February 2023 - Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence (88 FR 16190)
US Copyright Office, Federal Register · 16 March 2023 - Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability
US Copyright Office · 29 January 2025
How we pick and check these: our editorial method.
07Questions people ask
Who is the author of Zarya of the Dawn?
Kristina Kashtanova, for the text and for the selection, coordination and arrangement of the pages, according to the Copyright Office's February 21, 2023 letter. The Midjourney-generated images have no human author under US copyright law.
Did Zarya of the Dawn lose its copyright?
Not entirely. In its February 21, 2023 letter, the Office cancelled the original certificate and replaced it with a narrower registration with the same effective date, September 15, 2022, covering the human-authored text and the arrangement of the pages.
Why does one comic book registration matter so much?
Because the Copyright Office turned its reasoning into general policy. Its March 16, 2023 registration guidance, issued less than a month later, cites the Zarya letter and applies the same split between human and AI material to every applicant.