I think there's a bit of unkindness in your post. It isn't that nobody in the last 31 years working with the GPL has ever slapped their forehead and suddenly re

I think there's a bit of unkindness in your post. It isn't that nobody in the last 31 years working with the GPL has ever slapped their forehead and suddenly realized "Oh my gosh! Other countries exist!" It's that trying to write something like the GPL to work in multiple major legal systems at once is somewhere between superhuman and impossible. In the "impossible" case, there may be legal systems where neither it nor anything substantially like it can either in theory (by the letter of the law) or in practice (by how people behave, such as places like China that have historically treated foreign IP contracts as suggestions at best) is possible.