Fault is at the feet of the clone makers and those who used clone chips, not the legitimate manufacturer.
I am actually astounded by some of these responses. However, I do understand that they likely come from a lack of experience delivering hardware products at scale, and so I can't fault people for getting it wrong. Hence my favorite quote:
"A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way" --Mark Twain
Would you say that they also have "the absolute right to create drivers that sabotage counterfeits of their products"?
That's a different argument. You could argue that they should have the right given that (elsewhere you have argued) their governments have abrogated their responsibility to protect their IP. And that would be an interesting and compelling argument. But it's entirely different to "[having] the absolute right to create drivers that only work with their products in order to assure quality, performance and function." - and it would be disingenuous to keep arguing that.
> the FTDI case was a case of the company intentionally shipping malicious code used to brick the clones
don't you understand? FTDI does indeed have the absolute right to create drivers that only work with their products, but to intentionally damage a third party product so that it no longer works anywhere else, including with that third party's drivers, seems egregious.
One is the issue of intellectual property theft and what a company has a right to do in order to protect itself.
FTDI invested massive amounts of money to produce excellent solutions for a number of problems. I have personally been using their chips in my designs for over twenty years. I don't even remember when I started, it's possible it was at the very start of their history.
The fake chip makers --mostly in China-- steal intellectual property with impunity, hurting companies, ecosystems and costing job. In some cases they have completely imploded companies in the West.
We can either accept this at our peril or take a stand against it. The only people who are OK with intellectual property theft are those who don't understand the subject or haven't lived it.
My experience? I've had the experience of mortgaging my home to fund a business and then watch a company out of China clone my product and bring it into the US and European markets at half my price. I can't even begin to describe what this did do my business, the people who worked for me, my family and my health. I didn't lose it all because I am a resilient SOB, but it put me in the hospital twice in four years due to the stress.
It's really easy to voice opinions from behind a keyboard when the consequences of said opinions carry no personal consequences.
A company like FTDI and their products did not materialize from nothing. There are people, families, investment and hard work behind such offerings. Clones are not a victimless crime.
The other issue, of the two that I said were separable, is the damage to consumers due to fake chips being bricked by FTDI.
That, in my mind, is a separate matter and a very complex one at that.
There are at least two angles to this one. The first is that the hardware they were using was intentionally made with fake FTDI chips. This is likely the case for most cheap hardware coming out of China. If that garbage doesn't work it is 100% the responsibility of the designers of the hardware. They are thieves. Plain and simple.
If, on the other hand, the designers of the hardware had no idea and fake chips got into the supply chain, the problem is far more complex. At that point it is a question of tracing the supply chain in order to understand, if possible, how it happened. I won't go into the many permutations this could put on the table. Suffice it to say that anyone dealing with China knows full-well what they could be in for. Caveat emptor applies in the case of the OEM.
This is where the problem becomes far more complex and it becomes political. It is our politicians (US/Europe) who allowed us to come to a moment in time where an entire country is openly stealing intellectual property at almost every layer in industry as well as freely distributing it across the world with impunity. This is a far larger problem than a bunch of USB devices getting bricked because a company in Europe decides to defend themselves from what must be a massive loss of revenue of unimaginable scale. I can only imagine what FTDI could be, the people they could employ and the technologies they could develop if fakes could not exist in the market.
Counterfeit products have real and non-trivial consequences to entire societies and their existence should not be taken lightly.
I don't have the solution to this problem. Sadly, it's political. What I do know is that I'll be damned if I am going to blame the victim.
Perhaps you think it strengthens your argument to use a miscategorisation that both you and most of your readers know to be a false equivalence. It does not. It shows you're happy to ignore the truth in order to cast those you disagree with as criminals; or, you're ignorant, which I doubt.
You don't need to be happy with IP infringement in order to be not-happy with corporate (group A) [criminal] destruction of the property of others (group C) based on tortuous infringement of a third party (group B).
Not to mention that IPR goes against an established culture in the country of some of the infringers (group B).
TRIPS Art.35 requires IC circuit layouts to be protected for 10 years (as in 17USC S.904), IIRC. I don't know Chinese law though, perhaps IC related IPR has lapsed for the chips in question?
The OP headline chip is 20 years old (edit: I had the date wrong). Counterfeit, trademark infringement, is wrong of course.
>What I do know is that I'll be damned if I am going to blame the victim. //
You seem happy that one of the victims, the unwitting purchaser of an item having an copied FTDI chip in it, gets punished? In preparation of the sui generis IC mask rights the USA senate committees apparently were careful to ensure that users - "innocent purchasers" they're referred as - could only be punished by paying a royalty and that devices would not be destroyed or confiscated. That seems balanced and avoids punishing victims beyond what is reasonable.
A lot of fakes were distributed through reputable sources as originals. So you could for example build a medical device using expensive original components from digikey, only to see it breaking in the hospital for no apparent reason.
I bet people have _died_ due to FTDIs actions.
Medical device manufacturers would want both certificates of conformity and traceable parts. They'd want these if they built the product themself; they'd specify this if they got a sub-contract manufacturer. If the component supplier can't offer traceability back to the real manufacturer you'd probably want to buy from someone else.
https://www.jjsmanufacturing.com/blog/traceability-in-electr...
I don't think bricking the devices is the right thing for FTDI to do. The consumer friendly thing to do is give warning and an FDTI contact email to report the product so FDTI can talk to the manufacturer.
I'll bet that's an exaggeration. If you are going to say something like that you have to back it up with data.
I could just as easily make the claim that people have died due to fakes. We can do that and go round and round a silly pointless circle.
The problem of fakes is real. And it is likely very much political (addressed in another comment). What is is NOT is the legitimate manufacturer's fault, even if they defend their existence by refusing to allow fakes to function with their drivers.
Fake chip manufacturers are perfectly free to do the required R&D, issue and support their own drivers. However, they are thieves, and prefer to steal rather than do the hard work and take the risks their victims undertake.
I don’t think anyone is arguing that FTDI has to let those chips be supported by FTDI drivers. I believe that intentionally sabotaging devices that have clone chips in them (such that they won’t work even once disconnected from the computer running their driver or that the device will be damaged simply by plugging it into a computer with that driver) goes well beyond simply “refusing to allow fakes to function with their drivers.”
That’s not OK, IMO.
