Convicted fraudster and ‘pharma bro’ Martin Shkreli has sued Wu-Tang’s RZA in the long-running dispute over who owns the rights in Wu-Tang album ‘Once Upon A Time In Shaolin’, which was released with only one physical copy ever being made.
RZA is responsible for that dispute, Shkreli argues, because he managed to sell “a total of 150% of the copyrights” in his musical work, not because of bad maths, but because of breach of contract.
According to Shkreli’s new lawsuit, RZA sold him 50% of the copyrights in 2015 while also committing to transfer over the other 50% 88 years later, in 2103. But then in 2024 he sold another 50% share to PleasrDAO, the crypto collective that ended up with the original physical copy of the Wu-Tang album, after it was seized from Shkreli by a federal court.
As a result of RZA’s misconduct, says Shkreli’s in his legal filing, he has “suffered and continues to suffer direct and consequential damages”.
I think it’s fair to say, even if that’s true, few people will care about Shkreli - who caused widespread outrage after increasing the price of an HIV drug by 5000% in 2015 - suffering any damage, but his lawsuit reckons he is due “compensatory and actual damages” from both RZA and ‘Once Upon A Time In Shaolin’ co-producer Cilvaringz.
PleasrDAO, meanwhile, knew that Shkreli owned 50% of the copyrights in the album and was due the other 50% in 2103 when it negotiated its deal with RZA and Cilvaringz to get a 50% stake. Which means it is liable for ‘tortious interference with a contract’ and should therefore also pay some damages to Shkreli.
The whole ‘Once Upon A Time In Shaolin’ saga is long, eventful and very stupid. Wu-Tang Clan put a single copy of the album, contained on two CDs, up for auction in 2015. It was bought by Shkreli for $2 million a few months before he rose to worldwide infamy by massively hiking up the price of the drug Daraprim via the pharma company he had co-founded.
Shortly after that Shkreli was arrested over allegations of securities fraud, which ultimately resulted in a 2017 conviction and some jail time. He also had to forfeit some assets to the US government as part of his conviction and that included the single physical copy of the Wu-Tang album.
The US Marshals Service then sold the CDs to PleasrDAO for $4 million in 2021. The crypto collective subsequently did a $750,000 deal with RZA and Cilvaringz in 2024 to acquire the 50% of the copyrights associated with the album that they knew the two producers had retained in the 2015 deal.
Later that year Shkreli, who had been released from prison in 2022, admitted on a livestream that he still had copies of the album which he had made before the original CDs were seized by the feds.
PleasrDAO was very pissed off that the single-copy album it had bought for $4 million was in fact a several-copy album, with the other copies in the hands of a convicted fraudster who had implied he might release the record online. Indeed, they were sufficiently pissed off that they filed a lawsuit against Shkreli.
That lawsuit continues to go through the motions. In his response to the litigation, Shkreli has argued that when he forfeited the original physical copy of ‘Once Upon A Time In Shaolin’ to the authorities, there was no transfer of the copyrights he'd also bought in 2015, which means those rights still belong to him.
Meanwhile, his original 2015 agreement with RZA and Cilvaringz allowed him to make private copies of the record, PleasrDAO was well aware of that fact when it bought the album, and therefore the collective shouldn’t be surprised by the news that other copies exist.
Shkreli tried to get RZA and Cilvaringz formally added to the PleasrDAO lawsuit, insisting that his agreement with the two producers was a crucial component of the dispute with the crypto gang. But the judge overseeing the case, Pamela K Chen, rejected that request. Which seemingly prompted Shkreli’s decision to file his own countersuit, with RZA, Cilvaringz and PleasrDAO all named as defendants.
Commenting on that countersuit, Edward Paltzik - a legal rep for Shkreli - told Law360, “there’s a lot more to the ‘Once Upon a Time in Shaolin’ story than the one-sided media coverage to date has portrayed. The accurate and real story will start coming to light in the coming months”.
Meanwhile Steven Cooper, representing PleasrDAO, said that Shkreli’s past attempts to “distract and delay” in this dispute have been “consistently and strongly rejected” by the court, and “these counterclaims will meet the same fate”. Not least because the fraudster is openly admitting that he “retained rights to the album when he was under a court order to forfeit all of his rights in his criminal case”.
