Roland did defend their GS tech in the late 90's, when they sued Crystal/Atmel (Now known as DREAM) for sampling their GS sounds - a rough equivalent to an SC-55, though some have said some SC-88 sounds are in there too - and selling chips that were marketed as GS-compliant/capable because they had a GS-labeled bank attached to the chips or in the chip itself and used GS SysEx commands in their firmware. It resulted in official licensing of the GS sounds becoming a thing - Apple and Microsoft licensed SC-55 equivalent sounds for their respective software products - and the company did an official GS bank that was available to license for almost all of their SAM digital audio chips.
I don't know if they would defend it now and they haven't bothered to go after anyone who did SC-sampled SoundFont banks, but I do know that the Roland VSC offerings were revamped because there is a massive pile of MIDIs out in the wilds of the Internet which can only be played with proper hardware that is beginning to become hard to come by and because Roland needs to milk their tech portfolio for as much cash as they can, since they are in decline. Technically speaking, they do still manufacture the Sound Canvas hardware and never stopped making it, but it's now only built into their digital piano line of products, which sell for thousands of dollars a pop and most likely doesn't get used for MIDI work like the old Sound Canvas modules were. Yamaha does the same with their XG tech.