> Grand Theft Auto's publisher shut down efforts in the computer vision industry to use their game as a training data generation engine for self-driving car research.
Yes. I know many people still use it and if you're just a small university lab, Take-Two probably won't come after you. They still don't allow it, and researchers literally don't care (to the extent of not even knowing that there may be something to care about), us CS folks don't like to think about legal matters.
It appears that some people were distributing modified copies of the game or selling access to it as a driving simulator. In that case I agree that it's copyright infringement, in the same way that distributing modified copies of Photoshop or selling access to it as a cloud service would infringe on Adobe's copyright.
But that's different from using the game to generate data and only sharing that data (or using Photoshop to draw a picture) since there cannot be copyright infringement without copying.
Since LLwN requires the users themselves to obtain access to the content they want to study, there's no copying happening beyond what the user has the license to do, and hence no copyright infringement.
Did they? The GTA5 dataset is still up https://download.visinf.tu-darmstadt.de/data/from_games/ and widely used. I've never heard about any legal issues with it.