Cindy Cohn, legal director at the EFF, called me a while ago to figure out what to do with the bitcoin donations they were sent, and what to do with coins that might be sent to their donation address in the future.

Ideally, they'd like to return them, but that can't be done-- bitcoin has no "return to sender" function. Returning to the last-address-the-coins-were-sent-to doesn't work because people use shared online wallets and can, and do, send their coins to new wallets and delete old wallets.

The EFF is firm in their decision NOT to cash them in (they'll be coming out with a blog post explaining their reasons very soon), and after talking over several possibilities the idea they liked best was to redistribute the coins via the Bitcoin Faucet (and have any donations that trickle in get passed back out via the Faucet).  The reasoning is that anybody who donated bitcoins to the EFF would also support the mission of the Faucet-- to promote bitcoin by giving people new to the currency a little bit to start.

Other options for what to do with the EFF donations (like setting up a non-profit entity to take the donations and... do something with them...) were rejected as too complicated and/or costly.

I'll need to do a little bit of thinking about how to handle the EFF coins safely (just dumping them all into the Faucet's wallet is not a good idea; I would hate for them to get lost if somebody managed to hack the Faucet's web-facing code). Whatever I do, I will make sure the process of moving the coins from the EFF's donation address to the Faucet is absolutely transparent.