I think you've kind of missed the point. The "best practices" are likely more related to how you need to cover your ass to avoid being sued for IP issues or how to file your own patents if you're interested. It makes sense if you think about it. While businesses are trying to build up their software patent portfolios open source projects often ignore this side of things. While you may not be interested in filing patents the minefield will only get bigger over time and it helps when a group of lawyers is throwing out some friendly advice on how to stay out of trouble.

The paper seem to focus on case law. That only involves some former British colonies. Most countries create their laws and regulations through their political system, not their judicial system. Separation between legislative and executive powers are a really good thing from a democracy viewpoint. It means people are less likely to get abused by the legal system and that the process of creating, and decisions and motivations behind, a law or regulations become easy to follow, criticise and rectify for common people. It also make the legal system less complicated, cheaper and more robust. Common Law systems have a really bad track record compared to Civil Law systems.

Yeah, I know that even something that only involves two countries could be called "international", just like you could create a "internet" containing only two networks. But in this case the word international implies something more then just Common Law.