I agree. And in a way, end users have to bear some of the responsibility for this mess too - we all benefit from lower-priced components because of the electron

I agree. And in a way, end users have to bear some of the responsibility for this mess too - we all benefit from lower-priced components because of the electronics supply chain in China that freely mixes in counterfeit parts. No one who benefits from a crime or from immoral behaviour can be said to be completely innocent. We don't absolve people who buy diamond jewelry of all responsibility for buying 'blood diamonds' - we say that consumers have to be aware of where diamonds come from and hold jewelers responsible for sourcing diamonds carefully. I think the really unfortunate lesson for small parts suppliers like FTDI is that if they really want to protect their IP from Chinese counterfeiters free-riding on their driver development work, they need to begin building designs that require software uploads, binary blobs, and key exchanging, none of which are good for open hardware development and open source software.