The wild power struggle over the Wu-Tang Clan’s secretive, single-copy album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin kicked into high gear again this week, with disgraced pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli filing a counter lawsuit against RZA.
In his new federal court filing obtained by Rolling Stone, Shkreli claims he remains the rightful owner of half of the album’s current copyrights, with the other half purportedly due to him 88 years after he purchased the LP in 2015. He claims this even though federal officials seized the album and sold it for $4 million to digital art collective PleasrDAO as part of a 2021 auction organized to pay victims linked to Shkreli’s 2017 securities fraud conviction.
With his new counterclaims, Shkreli is asking the court to issue a declaratory judgment confirming his asserted copyright ownership. He contends that RZA and Wu-Tang Clan producer Cilvaringz wrongly reclaimed and resold the copyrights without his knowledge amid his criminal case woes. He says the alleged double-dipping ended with PleasrDAO acquiring the exclusive rights to exploit the album under a purportedly improper “duplicate sale.”
Explaining his view of the complicated saga across 35 pages, Shkreli says he paid $1.5 million for the only existing hard copy of the highly anticipated album in 2015 through a byzantine deal with RZA, born Robert Diggs; and Cilvaringz, whose legal name is Tarik Azzougarh; that was “bifurcated” into tangible and intangible deliverables. He alleges the tangible portion included the two-disc set tucked into an engraved nickel-silver box, a gold-leafed certificate of authenticity, and a leather-bound manuscript containing information about the musical work. The intangible side, meanwhile, included his purported immediate grant of 50 percent ownership of the album’s copyrights and the promised transfer of the remaining half in 2103, he claims.
Shkreli invoked the alleged 2015 agreement after PleasrDAO sued him first. In a complaint filed in June 2024, the group accused him of improperly retaining copies of the album after the criminal court ordered its full forfeiture. The group said it was concerned he had already released, or intended to release, some or all of the closely guarded music to the public.
Last month, a federal judge allowed PleasrDAO’s civil case to move toward trial, finding that the album could qualify as a trade secret unlawfully retained by Shkreli. In his Monday filing, Shkreli demanded a formal ruling that the album “is not a protected trade secret.”
Attempts to reach a lawyer for Diggs and Azzougarh were not immediately successful Tuesday. Steven Cooper, the lead lawyer for PleasrDAO, blasted Shkreli’s counterclaims.
“Mr. Shkreli’s approach throughout this case has been to distract and delay, with actions that the court has consistently and strongly rejected,” Cooper said in a statement sent to Rolling Stone. “These counterclaims will meet the same fate. They are untimely, non-cognizable, and oddly, claim that Mr. Shkreli retained rights to the album when he was under a court order to forfeit all of his rights in his criminal prosecution.”
At his criminal trial, Shkreli was convicted of repeatedly lying to investors as he ran a “Ponzi-like scheme” linked to his pharmaceutical company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, which notoriously bought the HIV and cancer-fighting drug Daraprim and then jacked its price from $13.50 to $750 per tablet overnight. Derisively dubbed a “pharma bro,” Shkreli was sentenced to seven years in prison.
In a prior interview with Rolling Stone, RZA said he regretted selling the album and fantasized about buying it back for himself. “It was hard for me to sell that album because I wanted it to be on my living room table,” he said with a laugh. “When it was finally completed, and everything was sent out, I was like, ‘This would be great in the Wu mansion.’ Whoever comes by here can see this piece of art sitting in my living room. I argued with the people that invested money to get the project on its way, but they wanted [their investment] back. So, it would’ve cost me more than the selling price in reality, because of the deficit that was already incurred. Also, everybody is like, ‘This ain’t for you. That’s even more selfish than selling it.’ They were talking to me to let that thing go.”
Members of PleasrDAO, meanwhile, have sought to share some of the album with fans through the sale of NFTs. “This beautiful piece of art, this ultimate protest against middlemen and rent-seekers of musicians and artists, went south by going into the hands of Martin Shkreli, the ultimate internet villain,” Jamis Johnson, PleasrDAO’s so-called Chief Pleasing Officer, told Rolling Stone in 2021. “We want this to be us bringing this back to the people. We want fans to participate in this album at some level.”
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