It was grabbed for use in testing image compression algorithms and became the de facto standard.
I don’t per-se have any issue with it on ethical grounds, but I do think that it was a bad choice in that it was copyrighted, even if Playboy, who owns the copyright, has been fine with it being used as the standard. I would rather that an image in the public domain have been used, whether of an attractive woman or no.
It’s not like they planned to make it the standard test image. Just a bunch of guys working on something looking for a quick test image and grabbing the first thing they found.
Such a small section of the original image and at such low resolution would be pretty petty to shut down for copyright infringement. Especially since it was not used for profit, but for scientific research.
