My forecast was wrong: Denmark did not block the the EU Council of Ministers from approving a proposed law which would allow patents on software. According to Groklaw, Bill Gates threatened the Danish Prime Minister with the loss of 800 software jobs if Denmark did not support the patents. Clearly Denmark was not so plucky after all. The website nosoftwarepatents.com explains the issues. Do you wish that SuperCalc had patented the spreadsheet? Or Wordstar had patented the word-processor? (If you think I am exaggerating, you may not know that in the US, Amazon has a patent on "one click" purchasing, that is, using cookies to keep track of an online shopping cart..) The European Parliament would need to approve this law. So far, they have not shown any signs of doing so. Now would be a good time to contact your MEP, and your MP, to ask them to vote against this proposal.