GPL: which country's law?

[Paul Reilly]

I speak as a systems integrator, located in the United Kingdom.

Unless I've missed something, the GPL V2 doesn't specify in which country's 
courts any dispute should be heard. (By comparison, the Mozilla PL 
specifies the courts of California; QPL specifies Norway, and so on).

Has anyone looked at where that leaves a systems integrator outside the US 
who builds a product using, say, an American distribution of Linux? There 
are a number of issues:

  - If I want my own legal advisors to research GPL for the purpose of 
compatibility with our own business model, should that be against the 
framework of UK law, or is only US law relevant?

  - Secondly (and this applies to US companies too), if I create a product 
which in some way incorporates GPL code (whether that 'incorporation' be 
very loose or very tight), and then I export it (maybe worldwide) what 
country's laws am I subject to? Could a customer in country X decide that 
his laws should apply, and choose to interpret GPL accordingly, possibly to 
my serious disadvantage? The GPL only mentions the case of countries where 
use of a program might be restricted by patents or copyright, but it 
doesn't unfortunately cover the case where a country's courts might 
interpret the linking (static vs dynamic) issue very differently from the US.

Could I get round this by creating some sort of wrapper around the GPL that 
fills this vacuum and positively defines the country of law?

Many thanks,
Paul Reilly
3G LAB Ltd, Cambridge, UK