Of possible impact

[anenko]

LJ is planning to delete inactive accounts (personal journals and communities which haven't been signed into for 24 months).

To quote:

Purging inactive accounts: One of the benefits of the work we've done to purge suspended accounts is that we will now be able to purge inactive journals and communities too--something you've been requesting for years! A journal is defined as inactive if it has not been logged into for 24 consecutive months. A community is defined as inactive if has not been updated for 24 consecutive months. Once an account is eligible to be purged for inactivity, the owner will be sent an email to alert them of the inactive status. The owner will then have two weeks to log into the journal or post to their community to prevent it from being deleted. If the owner does not log in or post, the account will be deleted and treated like any other deleted account (the owner will have 30 days to log in and undelete the account to prevent it from being purged).

I know this is definitely going to have an impact on some of the pages I've edited. Thoughts on how to deal with soon to be vanished references?

Comments

[elf]

if LJ unilaterally alters the collective work without getting all the requisite permissions, it's destroyed the value of the compilation copyright

I suspect there's no legal challenge there. You can't be nailed for copyright infringement for tearing pages out of a book before selling it. (For fraud, potentially, for offering to sell "Book Title" and instead selling "Book Title minus the pages with the smut.")

*Editing* content could get them in deep trouble; I can't see how deleting content would cause legal hassles.

Other than the "fraud: you promised your users X, and then reneged." But there's very little precedent for suing businesses for changing policies & screwing over users. (There is some; if it can be proven that permanent archives were part of their TOS, even if not listed on the TOS page, there's laws against changing that without notifying users. But that's a hard challenge to make.)

[djonn]

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.