That only worked because the people harmed by having their satellite cards bricked were willfully infringing DirecTV's copyrights, and suing DTV for frying their smartcards would be admitting it in court. At absolute best the pirates might get triple actual damages, but 3x the cost of a smartcard is next to nothing, and then the counter-suits would have been a slam dunk for DTV to win $750,000 statutory damages from each of them.
If FTDI wants to use that strategy they're going to have to contend that every end-user of a device with a counterfeit FTDI chip knew it was fake. Doesn't sound plausible to me, but the US courts are generally tech-idiotic so I suppose it's not entirely impossible.
Yeah. 18 years. That's the same bullshit climate change deniers have been using for a long time. Why the past 18 years? Because once you start going back farther in time, the evidence is undeniable and clear.
But if you limit what you look at and ignore the numbers that give clear evidence, yeah, you can force data to say whatever lies you want it to say.
They're also playing the class-action lawsuit lottery.
In fact, it might be worth the $5 to buy one of those cheap shit USB-to-serial adapters, let them brick it, and hope the settlement is that they have to give everyone affected a genuine FTDI one...
The biggest difference between time and space is that you can't reuse time. -- Merrick Furst