DISQUS

There are several problems with your argument, I'll state the biggest one. In a market mostly held by an incumbent company, competition is good because it forces the incumbent to keep innovating and offer value to the customers. The incentives of the small competitors are actually a lot less meaningful, because most consumers get their product from the incumbent. Your analysis focuses solely on the incentives of the small competitors, which are not the important part of the equation. If Intel is allowed to pay retailers and OEMs not to sell AMD machines, there is obviously less incentive for Intel to bring a better product to market compared to when it has to compete solely on merits and value. Whatever incentives this creates for AMD, it cannot possibly compensate for the damage done by skewing Intel's incentives.

1. The reduction in wages and benefits are meant to give the companies a better chance to recover, so the taxpayer's money doesn't go to waste when they collapse even with the help. Doing it two years from now doesn't help that, so it makes no sense.

2. Saying there will be wage changes in two years is totally meaningless. It means "give us money now, and we'll discuss the rest in two years." Two years later, if they recover, they'll say there's no need to cut wages *now*; and if they go bankrupt, at least they filled their retirement funds with some taxpayer money. If the companies do recover, it would actually be wrong for the government to have any say regarding their compensation policies.

3. No one is telling the auto workers to cut wages; they're only told to cut wages *if they want taxpayer money*, to increase the chance of the public getting the loan back. If they don't want to cut wages, that's fine. If they only want to do it in 2011, that's fine too, but then they shouldn't expect to receive public money before 2011.

I haven't seen the actual lawsuit so I'll take your word for it. The letters speak vaguely of "proprietary material" which I assumed includes the photographs.
It's possible that the copyright in the images belongs to the photographer but it's much more likely they were works for hire and belong to the firm.
As for fair use, the purpose of the reproduction is just one of four criteria for fair use; another one is how extensive the reproduction is, in this case the whole work. I find it hard to believe that this is acceptable fair use of a copyrighted photograph; as I said before, that would mean that any publication - a newspaper, a website, a blog - that "reports" on anything can use any copyrighted picture that relates to the text. That sounds implausible to me. Again, IANAL.
If the firm does hold the copyright to the photographs they should be scorned, not commended, for failing to use the one claim where they had a chance.

The trademark and linking claims are bogus, but I think posting the images actually is copyright infringement. If it weren't, any publication could put copyrighted images next to any related text, which is probably not the case. Do you think differently?
IANAL.

As the CAFC judges write in the opinion, the purpose of copyright is to preserve the monetary value of protected works. Once someone buys a book or a song, he doesn't need a license to use them in a way allowed by copyright law.

The opinion states that if a license offers additional freedoms beyond those allowed by copyright then breaching the license takes away those freedoms and the rules revert to those of copyright.

A license that tries to take away freedoms allowed by copyright law was not considered, but it if is treated in the same way then once it's breached the normal rules of copyright would apply, which makes the license moot.