Sure, but do they claim copyright on that? Am I not allowed to paste a log online?
... and those directly expose proprietary information.
How would copyrighting that information make any difference? As long as competitors can get to your logs (which is orthogonal to whether they hold a copyright) the copyright doesn't stop them from gaining that understanding. They could even publicly disclose their understanding.
Just encrypt the logs. Then no one will get at them and even if they manage to the act of decrypting them is illegal in most places so they probably won't publish it. And even if they do that it will be from one car, not a whole fleet.
Maybe I just don't understand copyright.
This is doubly so when driving on private property or in sensitive areas that forbid photography.
I doubt that public telemetry would have a negative impact on the tech itself. Quite the contrary. Not necessarily true for the business case of course. And although there is a connection, it would boost the tech if there would be publicly available telemetry.
Yes, however "you're removing my competitive advantage" has always an enormously bad argument for (or against) legislation.
With self driving cars, and other devices (like apple electronics) the logs they keep give you really really good insight into what sensors, techniques, and algorithmic approaches they are taking to problems, and those directly expose proprietary information. I would argue that this information entirely belongs to those companies (with an agreement to send this data to their servers).
Also most AI and self driving companies use the data collected by their existing fleet to further improve AI systems in these vehicles. The competitive advantage of most of these companies is how much data, with what sensors they are able to collect. Making that information public will have a huge negative impact on the tech and AI industry, essentially pulling the carpet out from underneath everyone.