| You are advocating willful destruction of property. Property that is neither yours nor FTDI's. This is illegal, and broadly considered bad taste. A counterfeiter commiting crimes against FTDI does not excuse FTDI committing crimes against a third party (i.e. the consumer).
The world being safer without the counterfeit products also does not excuse the FTDI destroying things that aren't theirs.
The justice system being ineffective at addressing counterfeiters is also no excuse for FTDI to take matters into their own hands. Vigilante justice is usually illegal. Programmers make mistakes. A bug in your counterfeit detection code may end up destroying legit products. In addition, you can not be sure destroying a product will be safe - if the chip is in a medical device, you might be killing someone. The entire idea of destroying a product without explicitly being told to do so is fraught with peril. You deal in false binaries. The third, imo correct, option is for FTDI to design software that works correctly with their own product, and spend no effort on the counterfeits - neither to get them to work correctly, nor to brick them on purpose. A fourth option, if you want to spend some effort on something other than destruction of property, is to take option three, and also alert the user that they are using a counterfeit chip with unpredictable behaviour, and in your airplane example, advise the user they should probably not take off. If you want to be pro-consumer, this is a better way to go about it than smashing their stuff. From the consumer's perspective, they had a working device, and a firmware update bricked it on purpose. It is possibly out of warranty, in which case they end up footing the bill (or experiencing frustration) for replacement and downtime. It takes Olympic levels of mental gymnastics to view that as 'pro-consumer', imo. |