Comment 2 for bug 782110

That seems to be fixed in Precise:

% locate usb.ids | grep -v /home | xargs ls -l
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 2012-04-12 16:34 /usr/share/hwdata/usb.ids -> ../misc/usb.ids
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 25 2011-12-26 19:15 /usr/share/misc/usb.ids -> /var/lib/usbutils/usb.ids
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 461454 2011-12-26 19:15 /var/lib/usbutils/usb.ids