Good, destroying a device you legally purchased is unacceptable, whether you knew it was a counterfeit or not. It's not their job to police that kind of stuff.
Failing to work with counterfeit devices is completely fine and would have been a much better approach than straight up bricking them.
Yeah, but looking at the physical differences between the chips it's probably not something that difficult to ensure. The counterfeit chips are built in a totally different fashion, with different size and materials, on a different process tech.
But that's impossible for something like a Windows driver to determine.
The only way the FTDI driver could determine if the chip counterfeit was a slight difference in how the counterfeit chips handled a certain EEPROM write. And the counterfeiters will be sure the next revision of the chip takes care of this corner case.
Sure, the driver doesn't know the manufacturing process. His point is the chips are simply so different, there are bound to be obvious ways for the driver to tell.
If the chip manufacturer needed this incredibly subtle trick to determine a real chip from a fake at the driver level, what does that say about how close the counterfeiters got?
The chip dies may be incredibly different, but the fake operated 99.99% like the real one. There were no "obvious ways" to tell them apart.
In the US there isn't a legal way to purchase counterfeit goods. It may be different in other countries. Similar to stolen property, the person left holding the bag gets in trouble too.
Edit: after actually looking up the issue instead of guessing it turns out that in most places (other than France and Italy) there isn't much at stake for the end user, and almost all of the laws are written to stop the sale or manufacture of counterfeit items.
> "In the US there isn't a legal way to purchase counterfeit goods."
Sure, but the mechanism for combating counterfeiting is the government and law enforcement organizations, not unilateral action by the aggrieved party.
FTDI has no authority - moral or legal - to be bricking devices. This is vigilantism.
It is however perfectly legal to make a hardware device that could make use of the Same API and driver i.e a clone. Provided it is not branded as a FTDI chip, but rather "FTDI Driver compatible"
Now that may violate the terms and lic of the driver software on windows (not on linux because it is GPLv2) but that would not make it illegal to buy nor would it give them (FTDI) the legal right to modify that hardware
Using the FTDI vendor ID is branding it as an FTDI product. I would argue that it is even more important than the text printed on the chip since that is the part of the brand that the average end user is exposed to.
There doesn't appear to be any legal protection on USB vendor IDs though. It's just important if you want to follow the rules of the USB-IF, but that's no legal requirement.
Failing to work with counterfeit devices is completely fine and would have been a much better approach than straight up bricking them.