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Martin Shkreli was the proud (and only) owner of the Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin before it was seized from the federal government, but the collective who purchased it after it was repossessed asserts he kept a copy in a lawsuit that was recently filed against the infamous “Pharma Bro.”
It’s pretty hard not to be fascinated by the wild saga involving Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album.
It was auctioned off in 2015 for $2 million to a buyer who was eventually identified as Martin Shkreli, who made headlines around the same time thanks to the backlash to his decision to hike the price of a prescription drug that was used to treat HIV and AIDS.
A couple of years later, the widely reviled CEO ended up in prison after being put on trial for securities fraud, and he was ultimately forced to forfeit $7.4 million worth of assets to the feds—including the Wu-Tang album in question.
In 2021, we learned Once Upon a Time in Shaolin had been sold for $4 million to PleasrDAO, a self-described “collective of DeFi leaders, early NFT collectors and digital artists” who pledged to finally bring it to the people.
It took a few years, but they followed through on that promise last month after announcing an installation at a museum where visitors will get the chance to hear a curated selection of tracks for the first time (unfortunately, the museum in question is located on the island of Tasmania).
The hype surrounding Once Upon a Time in Shaolin stems from the fact that only a single copy (consisting of 31 tracks spread across two CDs) was produced, and its uniqueness is preserved by a contract anyone who owns it is required to abide by that contains clauses prohibiting commercial sales or duplication.
Now, The New York Post reports Shkreli has ended up at the receiving end of a lawsuit filed by PleasrDAO that asserts he violated the terms of the contract by burning a copy of the album to keep for himself before playing some of it in a listening party he hosted on Twitter on Sunday night.
The filing seeks to force Shkreli to destroy any copies he’s retained on top of the punitive and compensatory damages the collective argues it’s entitled to, saying their existence “greatly diminishes and/or destroys the album’s value.”
Based on the testimony of a Reddit user who listened to a previous stream, Shkreli claims the contract he signed when he purchased the album gives him free rein to play the songs publicly even if he no longer owns a physical copy.
That seems like a major oversight if he’s telling the truth, so it’ll be very interesting to see how this case plays out in court.