I wonder if this would fall under protections for satire.

Fair use actually makes a distinction between satire and parody: satire isn't protected. https://apps.americanbar.org/litigation/committees/intellect...

Technically, parody is using X's IP to comment on X; satire is using X's IP to comment on something else. So if this is parody, it would plausibly fall under America's fair use test.

Didn't volkswagen "fix" some emission tests in this manner?

Yeah they were fined like $15B and had people arrested and criminally charged in multiple countries.

They had 'defeat devices' that detected test environments and changed how the car ran so that it would pass emissions testing.

That's less than a month worth of revenue.

And only 2 or 3 people are in jail afaik.

Only a light slap on the wrist.

Or a year worth of profits. Hardly a slap on the wrist.

Did the CEO Martin Winterkorn? Looks like he got away though.

It falls under the protection of the Streisand effect.

I bet VW won't sue anyone about this soon to not have new negative publicity. And I agree, this is clearly satire.

Satirical software would be a cool new trend in Open Source.

I think about things like a library for leader election, where there is a "Russian hacker" service that manipulates the election result or maybe a logging framework that accumulates logs and occassionally emails them to journalists.

https://www.jollycode.org/, mentioned in another comment, is exactly what I was looking for.

I bet nobody from VW is going to know this exists for a year or more, if ever. How many VW corporate employees do you think browse HN?

> How many VW corporate employees do you think browse HN?

Out of more than 600'000? A bunch, I bet.

(Yes, I was shocked at the number too)

VW, presumably, has armies of software engineers/other technical people (That you might find on HN, etc) so I don't think it's unreasonable to assume someone will stumble across it.

It's also worth saying that even if they don't have a automated system to look for x-infringement, they have many employees who when bored could end up searching for (say) Volkswagen on github.

Whether they care or not is another matter...

It's a pretty blatant use of their trademark. (It outright uses their name) I have my doubts.

Trademarks are only protected in the US if there is risk of consumer confusion during commerce:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trademark_infringement#Factors

There is definitely a credible risk of consumer confusion here - when a consumer faces a need to cheat a test it is unclear which Volkswagen the consumer would have to use. I think the original auto Volkswagen has a strong case here (note - IANAL, just another confused consumer).

We should file a suite against Volkswagen just to test - I’m sure it’ll pass

Quick fork that shit

Volkswagen in this case has only trademark, unlike Nintendo in your example also having copyrights.

Offtopic:

>If nintendo goes batshit when people refurbish gameboys

Source for this? I know they've renewed their interest in going after ROM sites recently, but I've seen no indication they wish to stop people from repairing or refurbishing old, unsupported hardware.

Even if they raise an issue every once in a while you can tactictly tell them to go away. And the company will, swearing is sometimes useful in the response.

> I clicked thinking there was yet another scandal in the brewing but it's actually a software named volkswagen.

Thats the joke though. It passes tests for you even when they would fail. Like Volkswagen AG

I am not a lawyer, but if somewhere it says "a work of parody", that should suffice for fair use. That said, nothing stopping VW from raking them over the coals. Github would probably just take the repo or account down if it came to that.

It doesn't even need to say it. Basically as long as the judge finds it funny and agrees it's satire, you're ok:

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/828...

Europe tends to have less freedom for parodies than the US.

This is OK though. (IANAL, but I've seen cases like this)

Good point.

I would expect vw to try this as low as possible. If they went to court they would learn about the Streisand effect.

Well, their woes can't possibly be publicized any more widely, and 99.999% of the people who would read the news about such a lawsuit would have no use of the software, so I'm not sure the Streisand effect has any real meaning here.

maybe remove it a bit, like voltzwagone.