TBFH I don't think Spring itself should have much fear of a lawsuit atm.
- We renamed from TA Spring to Spring to make clear Spring != OTA remake long ago
- We do not ship OTA content (SpringDownloader != Spring, and besides that we (I, at least) did not even know about the automatic download until zwzsg made the thread about it. I'm sure Licho will fix this bug now many OTA mods include OTA content.)
- We do not promote playing OTA based mods over other mods.
- Spring itself can be used and is used for playing entirely legal games (there are a number of complete, legal, and playable games around)
So at worst Spring is now in the category of P2P programs: you CAN use it for less legal stuff like playing OTA based mods (compare downloading mp3s / movies), like many probably do, but it's not MENT to play illegal games, and it CAN be used (and is used) to play legal games (compare downloading linux distros).
Therefore I think it would be silly to implement a CD check or a tool to create OTA datafiles from the OTA CD. This would just acknowlegde that Spring is ment to be played with OTA based mods only. Besides that, all non-OTA based mods would suffer from this, because it would be silly to implement a CD check that can simply be turned off by the mod.
For the same reason I think separating the forums into OTA based mods and non-OTA based mods is not a good idea: again this would give the OTA based mods a special position that could be explained as the Spring project supporting OTA based mods specifically.
Which we don't, Spring is a mod/game agnostic project: Spring is a general purpose Real Time Strategy engine, and not yet another OTA clone.