>There have been several instances, however, where large American companies have tried to get Europe to allow software patents. Luckily so far all of these have been blocked:
It's somewhat complex, but in general most of the contentious US software patents wouldn't be valid in the EU, which is why Europe has only seen a handful of software patent cases over the last decade.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Euro...