Comment Re:The good news (Score 1) 700
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.