Disgraced pharmaceutical mogul Martin Shkreli is being sued for allegedly sharing recordings from Wu-Tang Clan’s one-of-one album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.
The seventh studio album of the hip-hop group was recorded in secret over the course of six years and upon completion was pressed into a single two-CD copy. The CD was stored in a vault for a year before being auctioned off in 2015. The sale came with a legal agreement that it couldn’t be copied or commercially exploited for 88 years, though it could be streamed for the public at in-person listening events.
Shkreli, who was the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals at the time, paid $2 million USD for the Once Upon a Time in Shaolin CD. The album was ultimately seized by the US Government in 2018 when he was arrested for fraud and eventually sold in 2021 to the NFT group PleasrDAO for $4 million USD.
PleasrDAO is now suing Shkreli for violating the auction’s legal agreement by allegedly making digital copies of the LP and distributing them to his social media followers.
Filed in a Brooklyn court, the lawsuit cites a livestream Shkreli held on X over the weekend, in which he reportedly played the album. The instance was apparently not the first time he played the album to the public, as the suit cites a separate occasion where he played the album for his followers in 2022, one month after his release for instance.
“Of course I made MP3 copies, they’re like hidden in safes all around the world. I’m not stupid. I don’t buy something for two million dollars just so I can keep one copy,” Shrekli said during one livestream, according to the suit.
PleasrDAO is asking that Shkreli delete any copies he’s made of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, grant them any compensation he’s made off of the album and to pay additional punitive damages.
