Martin Shkreli countersued PleasrDAO and RZA, claiming he owns 50% of Wu-Tang’s rare album until 2103, when he turns 120 years old.
Martin Shkreli just threw a legal curveball at the people who bought Wu-Tang Clan’s one-of-a-kind album.
The former pharma exec filed a countersuit Monday night in Brooklyn federal court. He’s going after PleasrDAO, the digital art collective that paid $4 million for Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.
But he’s also targeting Wu-Tang’s RZA and producer Cilvaringz.
Shkreli claims he still owns 50% of the album’s copyrights. His argument? The original 2015 contract states that his copyright stake reverts to him in 2103. That’s when he’d be 120 years old.
“The defendants violated his rights when PleasrDAO paid RZA and Cilvaringz $750,000 for that stake,” Shkreli’s legal team wrote. They say RZA and Cilvaringz basically sold “a total of 150% of the copyrights.”
That math doesn’t add up if Shkreli really owns half. PleasrDAO’s lawyer Steven Cooper isn’t buying it.
“Mr. Shkreli’s approach throughout has been to distract and delay with actions that the court has consistently and strenuously rejected,” Cooper said in an email to The Daily Record. “These counterclaims will meet the same fate.”
This whole saga started when PleasrDAO sued Shkreli in June 2024. They accused him of keeping copies of the album and livestreaming parts of it to his followers.
The collective said he violated his 2015 sale contract by doing that.
Shkreli originally bought the album for $1.5 million in 2015. But he had to give it up in 2017 after his conviction for defrauding hedge fund investors and scheming to defraud investors in his drugmaker Retrophin.
The government sold the album to PleasrDAO for about $4 million in 2021.
Last September, U.S. District Judge Pamela Chen allowed PleasrDAO’s lawsuit to proceed. She said the album’s value comes from the collective’s “ability to exploit its exclusivity to create an ‘experience’ that its competitors cannot.”
But now Shkreli is fighting back. He wants unspecified damages and profits from RZA, Cilvaringz, and PleasrDAO.
Shkreli became known as “Pharma Bro” in 2015 when he jacked up the price of the life-saving drug Daraprim from $17.50 to $750 per tablet overnight.
He was released from prison early in 2022 and is banned from the pharmaceutical industry.