A WIPO Press Release has announced the death last Sunday of the organisation's former Director General Árpád Bogsch. The press release records Dr Bogsch's formal achievements. He will be remembered by his friends as a warm and convivial leader and as a highly capable administrator, who vigorously encouraged the promotion of intellectual property rights and of international systems for their protection. Others may recall him as an autocratic and arbitrary empire-builder who sought to impose and retain a strict and rigid control of his organisation and its accounts. Whichever view you take, he was certainly a remarkable man who made a massive contribution to the shape of intellectual property law as we know it today.