When they say their driver may harm a product of another vendor, I normally take that to mean that they cannot guarantee that it won't break by "normal use" by the FTDI driver. That they intentionally take measures to break it makes it a whole new type of game.
I can visually see the difference between the fake FTDI chips that I have and the real ones.
If the consensus is that it is legal to fake the FTDI VID, then the fake parts are legal, except maybe the trademarked "FTDI" marking printed on the top. I don't think it is fair that FTDI disables the chips that violate that trademark. What right do they have to involve consumers that happen to have bought an item that contains a trademark violating component?
When I look on the "Texas instruments" site they have a "pricing at 1k" column in their product selection tables. As I don't buy components from them in 1k units, those prices are way lower than what I pay with Farnell for 2, 5 or 10 of them. With a lot of products we KNOW that in china people can earn money from putting items in envelopes at $1 per item including shipping. So what makes it impossible that someone in china bought 1k FTDI chips and is willing to sell them to me at cost+shipping+margin ending up cheaper than Farnell at 5, 10 or 20 quantity?
Also, getting the right amount of chips at the right moment in time for production is difficult. So if someone has bought 100k chips, but then the production run gets cancelled at 80k and they are left with 20k chips but no PCBs to put them on. What now? If you sell them at the normal price every potential buyer will buy from the normal distributer. So with the leftover chips, someone will have to take their loss, and sell them below "normal" price (which for that person/company is better than taking a 100% loss on those chips). So it is also conceivable that some chips are available at prices BELOW normal volume prices because of some over-buying situations.
Is everything from that end of the globe fake? If you buy an STM32F103 development board, is the STM chip on there fake?
As for what FTDI can do about the fakes, wouldn't it be much nicer if they said (say, in a popup window): "The chip you have connected claims to be FTDI, but is in fact a fake. We, FTDI, invested time and money to make drivers for our chips. Please contact the vendor of this chip for the driver for their chip".
Well, there are plenty of ways they could have taken instead of bricking hardware. And it obviously is a problem for them when they are taking such ridiculous action as to sabotage someone else's hardware.
Such as?
If you buy a game from vendor X and in the EULA it says it cannot guarantee to work on PCs that have games from other vendors installed. Would you read that EULA? Would you be surprised if it erased essential parts of the other game? What if you load a driver/utility for your seagate disk, and it intentionally bricks the western digital drive in your computer? Would that be OK?