A registrar's letter split a comic's text from its generated images

The process wall

Kris Kashtanova registered the comic 'Zarya of the Dawn' as a human-authored work, then told the US Copyright Office that its interior pictures had been generated with Midjourney from text prompts. On 21 February 2023 the Office issued a cancellation letter re-examining that registration, the letter records. The wall the applicant met was not a badly written prompt; it was the gap between a prompt and the pixels a diffusion model chose to fill it with. The Office kept the certificate but narrowed its scope: the story's text and the choices about which images went where, and in what order, stayed protected; the interior images themselves did not.

What the documents show

The letter states that Midjourney generates images from text descriptions and that Kashtanova could not predict or control the exact visual result of a given prompt, only refine the wording and select among outputs. That description was not a one-off finding. The Office's registration guidance, issued the following month, cites this same case as its example of a hybrid submission, using it to explain how such works should be split on the application form: claim the human contribution, disclaim the machine-generated material. Read together, the two documents draw the same boundary twice, once case by case and once as general policy for every applicant after Kashtanova.

Authorship and limitation

The mechanism named here is control, not effort or intention. A prompt is treated as an instruction to a system that then supplies an image's composition, colour and detail on its own account; the human contribution stops at the instruction and the selection among results. Selecting and arranging already-finished elements, by contrast, is the traditional territory of compilation authorship, the same doctrine that protects an anthology editor's running order. The limitation is not about how the pictures look or how much labour went into prompting; it is about who is shown to have fixed the expressive choices in the images, and by the applicant's own account that was the software.

What survives

What survives for a maker in this position is narrower than a full copyright but not nothing: the words, the sequence, and the decision about which panel goes where remain the applicant's property, and a rights holder can still license or act on that arrangement. Editorially, a maker who wants stronger protection over imagery should keep and disclose the parts of a process that show fixed, non-machine-determined expression, such as an original drawing fed in as an input rather than only described in a prompt.

• Read the cancellation letter's own account of how Midjourney was used, rather than a summary of it.
• Check a later application against the guidance's fields for describing what a human author created and what material is excluded.
• Ask, for any hybrid work, which parts were fixed by a human hand and which by a model's own output.

The letter is one registration decision, not a statute, but the Office pointed back to it as the template when it wrote guidance for every other applicant the following month.