This very serious problem was entirely ignored in GPL version 2, which behaves as though in 1991 the entire world used US copyright law and would be satisfied with a robust but unlawyerly US copyright license whose diction and drafting pattern are unprofessional in the best sense. Notwithstanding the US tendency to fetishism about copyright formality, however, US law about licensing is by no means the most encrusted with obscene formalism. And, as one might expect, obscene formalisms in one place unavoidably conflict with equally preposterous axioms in another.

For this combination of reasons, GPLv3 needed to meet legal engineering requirements unique in previous experience. We needed a global copyright license, structured and expressed so that—translated literally rather than conceptually in order to meet local language requirements—it would achieve its desired legal objectives in all the legal systems with established copyright law where developers currently produce or parties currently commercially distribute GPL’d software, which is nowadays pretty much everywhere.

The Free World’s previous experiment in transnational licensing structure, Creative Commons, had taken the more traditional course. Larry’s License Factory produced excellent localized licenses, depending on the country the individual putative licensor checked on the webform, sponsored and assured by each national chapter of CC.

But this approach was not desirable for GPLv3, and I had long since decided against using it, which is why the Free Software Foundation never licensed official translations of GPLv2. Instead, we adopted a form of drafting I called “supra-systemic”: the license uses a vocabulary that contains no terms of art in any legal system. All legal readers are at an equal distance from its vocabulary. The license disposes of the copyright holder’s exclusive rights within limits established by certain conditions that define the scope of the grant. Those conditions are almost entirely expressed in terms of technical facts; the license asks lawyers and judges only one question of law: whether on domestic copyright principles, the activity being disputed over requires a license.

This architecture, which incorporates simple local legal principles by reference, works to provide uniformity of operation so long as no system’s adjective rules or thresholds of validity are offended by the license. Those constraints satisfied, an unusual document took shape in fall 2005, as we completed the initial procedural steps leading to the publication of a first license draft: a global copyright license, written once to work everywhere, governing an enormous inventory of existing and rapidly-growing rights.