Dan Gillmor writes about grants in his latest column.
I have a few comments.
(Dan Gillmor) "Another disaster in the intellectual-property arena is the patent system, which has all but imploded on itself. The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (PTO) is infamous for its willingness to issue absurd patents. This is creating a major drag on innovation as companies fight off unfair claims and spend uncreative time and money getting their own, defensive patents.Some foundation should fund what amounts to a legal swat team that challenges bad patents. (There is risk in this approach: It might reward bad behavior at a policy level. Even if the PTO wanted to reform, Congress doesn't let the PTO use all the money that comes in from patent applications to hire better examiners, thereby helping to perpetuate a broken system.)
The main thing I have been saying in "Grenzen des Patentwesens" (in German): Sooner or later people will fight back against misuse of the patent system by organizing a collective response. I had not thought of grants as a possible source of funding at the time. So it is very interesting news to hear that Creative Commons received a 1.2 million dollar grant. There might be some serious money available for a "legal swat team that challenges bad patents" as well.
(Dan Gillmor) "But encryption still is not easy to use in basic communications such as e-mail, at least for the average person, and the marketplace hasn't responded. Some organization should seed the development of a robust privacy toolkit that includes easy-to-use encryption."
Actually that is already happening, the "some organization" being the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology and the privacy toolkit being called "GNU Privacy Guard".