At least he had the good sense to back off, in comments, from his ludicrous initial argument: that the fair use exception for satire allows any copyrighted material to be used in the parody — regardless of whether it’s the subject of the parody or not. If that were the case, Mad Magazine could probably enjoy a sales bump by including burned copies of Photoshop as inserts.
But even in his new, more moderate position (fair use by fiat), Arrington is still wrong. It’s an increasingly common mistake: folks use a low-fidelity version of a copyrighted work for illustrative purposes within the context of a larger original work and assume it’s okay. It sure seems like this should be okay — it’s not the main point of the work, it’s just decoration. And it was so easy! I’m all for making this sort of thing kosher when employed by noncommercial projects, but right now it’s not. It’d be nice if Arrington was a little less preachy when talking out of his ass.