501(c)(3) status - after looking over some IRS pubs, I think this may be a possibility if the purpose of the corp is properly framed.  In our case, it would have to be something along the lines of "promoting the education and awareness of intellectual property issues".  One way the corp would do that is by providing a web site for discussion.  Since the web site welcomes all positions, we should not run afoul of the legislative or political activity restrictions.  Depending on the makeup of the corp, some folks may need to include disclaimers on stuff they write indicating it is their own position and not the corp's position.  The flip side of all this is there is a lot of paperwork and administrative stuff to be attended to in order to maintain the 501(c)(3) status.  So, there would have to be some analysis of pros and cons.

Form of the corporation - still looking into this (e.g. inc. or LLC or something else).  Likewise there have been discussions about a location for the corp if it is pursued.

Legal defense funds - maintaining such a fund might be one purpose of the corp if we wanted to expand beyond the IPW walls.  I found some calls for a Bloggers Legal Defense Fund from around December 2004, but it looks like the idea was never picked up.  I also found the Media Bloggers Association that may have some interest to some here.  The problem I consistently run into (the same for me) is the lack of a way for small, independent bloggers to have counsel to fight the run of the mill harassment suit.

Membership - the discussions about who would be members, controlling interests, etc., have been interesting.  I really cannot discern a good way to handle this yet though.

IRC - I think br3n mentioned this as a way to hold a "conference" or "meeting".  I looked into setting up an IRC server as part of the ip-wars.net site, but it would violate the TOS with my host.  I'm not really familiar with IRC, so I'm guessing some other alternatives may be available.  Anyone care to tackle setting up an IPW channel?

Totally OT - This is way off topic, but I've been trying to get an old PC loaded up with Linux to use as a server here at my house.  I've tried FC3, FC4, SuSE 9.3, OpenSUSE 10.0, all to no avail.  Every single one of them goes through the install process fine until I have to insert the second CD.  Then every one of them throws an error indicating they cannot access the CDROM.  I'm thinking of installing a new CD drive (possibly DVD) and see if that works.  Any ideas?