'Toxic' WIPO catches flak as US congressmen call for Gurry's head

The heads of several congressional committees have written to John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, to urge him to deal with the corruption scandal boiling over at the UN's WIPO. As The Register reported last week, a secret UN report into the behaviour of Francis Gurry, the head of the WIPO, found him guilty of “conduct... …

[Anonymous Coward]

My, so little jurisdiction yet so much vitreol

Sounds like someone isn't doing whatever "uncle sam" tells him to do.

[Paul Crawford]

Re: My, so little jurisdiction yet so much vitreol

Maybe, maybe. But lets face it, it appears WIPO is almost the thinking man's FIFA in terms of inability to deal with internal corruption. Sadly it took the USA to step in and force action on FIFA.

Almost, as there is always ICANN...

[Patras]

WIP

World Intellectual Property Organisation

[Sven Coenye]

Drive-by PDF delivery vehicle?

Dear El Reg,

For those who no longer have Adobe plugins installed, this article triggers a download of the inlined PDF letter every single time the page is accessed.

Ick.

[Shadow Systems]

Re: Drive-by PDF delivery vehicle?

I had sent them a Corrections email about it earlier & got a reply back acknowledging the issue.

Except then it only affected the Mobile version of the site, whereas NOW it also affects the normal version as well.

Not only have they not fixed it, they've bloody well gone & fekked it up even further.

This sucks. =-(

[Mike Moyle]

Whistleblowers against "them" = GOOD!

Whistleblowers against "us" = BAD!

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

Freedom fighters / terrorists. Perception is reality.

[Tom7]

"Rouge countries," eh?

Typical "red under the bed" politics from congress, then.

[Mark 85]

Irrespective of who's calling for this.... he should have been fired some time ago. Oh .. wait. This is the UN and they're above everyone else.

[veti]

Who should?

The heads of those congressional committees? Absolutely! They've amply demonstrated their own - not incompetence, exactly - say rather, indifference - to what they're supposed to be engaged with.

What I see here is congresscritters punting a political football that, like all of its kind, is solely intended to distract attention from what they themselves are doing.

As for the allegations against Gurry himself - as far as I can see, what they're really upset about is an HP printer being sent to North Korea. "Oh noes, the Norks might have access to printer technology! Run for the hills!"

Grow the feck up already. In so far as it's possible to reverse engineer anything from a printer, that knowledge is already freely available to anyone who can find $8000 in their capital budget.

[Gordon 10]

you missed the bit where he is subverting procurement processes and awarding them to a buddy of his then?

That's generally something that we in WIERD countries look down our nose at the rest of the world on whilst proclaiming we're tough on bribery and corruption.

[Gene Cash]

Paging Ed Snowden

They're concerned about retaliation against whistleblowers? Seriously?

They should get out of their glass house before throwing stones.

[The Bam]

Anyone else notice that the letter refers to "rouge states" (sic)? Gentlemen, start your engines.