"All they have to say is "We write our drivers to support our chips, if it messes with other chips that incorrectly identify as ours, that's just the way it went, it'd cost us extra to support them and why should we help our competitors"."

Buzz, thanks for playing. :)

That won't get them out of discovery for various torts, and the discovery (emails, code, etc) is likely to show they did this on purpose.

It's not practically impossible, it's trivially easy to disassemble and see if it does this on purpose. Then you argue it to a jury, and it's going to look really really bad for FTDI.

I wish German civil law had something like your discovery process.

Over here the claimant probably would not be able to peek into the defendant's stuff.

Especially if he can't specifically claim "on march 10th, Mr. Meier sent an email to Mr. Schmidt discussing topic X".

A simple "hand over your mails about the matter at hand" would be ruled a "fishing expedition", not admissible as a motion to discover.

They have a track record of trying to fingerprint and screwing with counterfeits, so it would appear there's evidence the driver doesn't happen to disable counterfeits, but actively disables them. To me there's a fuzzy distinction (possibly not reflected in law) between software that breaks when you make it do stuff you didn't design, versus having it attack things you don't want it to work with.

To quote CTZ: "You should look up the word 'intent' in law."