And that's just it: it seems to me that removing comments made by User X from a journal created and maintained by User Y looks to me like "editing" the collective work that is User Y's journal -- and as you say, editing content impermissibly seems likely to get them in deep trouble.
Using your analogy, it's the equivalent of tearing chapters out of some copies of the book after they sold a lot of copies of the original version. Which is itself an imperfect analogy, because that more or less describes what TSR had to do to its original Deities & Demigods role-playing rulebook; the distinction there is that TSR had included material to which it hadn't secured the necessary rights in the first place.
It's an interesting legal question, though as folk below have noted, LJ appears to have blinked in the face of its users' righteous wrath, such that it may not arise to anything like the degree initially feared.
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Using your analogy, it's the equivalent of tearing chapters out of some copies of the book after they sold a lot of copies of the original version. Which is itself an imperfect analogy, because that more or less describes what TSR had to do to its original Deities & Demigods role-playing rulebook; the distinction there is that TSR had included material to which it hadn't secured the necessary rights in the first place.
It's an interesting legal question, though as folk below have noted, LJ appears to have blinked in the face of its users' righteous wrath, such that it may not arise to anything like the degree initially feared.