Martin Shkreli Accused of Copying and Sharing One-Of-a-Kind Wu-Tang Album in New Lawsuit (2024)

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Martin Shkreli Accused of Copying and Sharing One-Of-a-Kind Wu-Tang Album in New Lawsuit? ›

The convicted pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli has been sued in New York by a digital art collective that said it paid $4.75m for a one-of-a-kind album by the hip-hop group Wu-Tang

The art collective that bought the secret album from the government, PleasrDAO, sued Shkreli in June, alleging that he duplicated the album, sent copies of it to other people and played parts of it during live streams in violation of his original purchase agreement when the Wu-Tang Clan auctioned it off.

So-called “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli has been ordered by a federal judge to turn over all copies of the ultra-rare unreleased 2015 Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin and is barred from streaming any additional content from the record.

Shkreli bought the only copy of Wu-Tang's double album, “Once Upon a Time In Shaolin,” for $2 million in 2015, just days before his company raised the price of its AIDS drug. The hip-hop group did not know the reviled Shkreli was the buyer.

The album was recorded in secret over six years from 2007 to 2013. A single two-CD copy was pressed in 2014 and stored in a secured vault at the Royal Mansour Hotel in Casablanca, Morocco, then sold through auction house Paddle8 in 2015.

The album had once belonged to Shkreli, who purchased it directly from Wu-Tang Clan for $2 million in 2015.

The surreptitious Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin maintains its advocacy for valuing music in the digital age. Under the ownership of PleasrDAO, the digital art collective, the album is now available to the public as an NFT for at least $1, highlighting a pivotal shift from its exclusive past.

“Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” the world's most expensive album when Martin Shkreli purchased it, will be played at a museum in Tasmania, Australia.

Once Upon a Time in Shaolin was originally sold to Shkreli for $2 million back in 2015, after he rose to infamy for hiking the price of a critical Aids drug that same year.

World's rarest album, Wu-Tang Clan's single-copy 'Once Upon a Time in Shaolin', headed to Australian museum. NEW YORK (AP) — The sole physical copy of Wu-Tang Clan's unreleased “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” is headed to Australia's Museum of Old and New Art.

Why did Ghostface sue RZA? ›

Ghostface reportedly filed the suit in 2005, accusing RZA – aka Robert Diggs – of withholding royalties from several early Wu-Tang Clan albums. According to Ghostface, RZA should have received the same share of royalties as the rest of the group, not the 50% cut he claimed as producer.

"I don't think the world had ever seen something so potent at one time," Raekwon tells the Recording Academy. "No one had seen a group of nine emcees like us with so much charisma and talent." Vision helped, too. You cannot discuss the success of Wu without mentioning RZA, the mastermind behind the Wu collective.

RZA operated as Wu-Tang Clan's de facto leader, producing the group's songs and deciding who would get placed on which tracks.

For during the '90s and early '00s, the FBI had targeted the Wu-Tang Clan, branding it a criminal enterprise (“the WTC Organization”) that was “heavily involved in the sale of drugs, illegal guns, weapons possession, murder, carjackings, and other types of violent crimes.” And from 1999 to 2004, the Bureau sought the ...

Bearer, whose real name is Andre Johnson, shocked his family and friends in 2014 when he sliced off his genitals with a kitchen knife and jumped off the second-story balcony of his condo in North Hollywood.

Remedy. Remedy is a rapper and hip-hop producer. He is known for being the first white and the first Jewish rapper to be affiliated with the Wu-Tang Clan. He owns and runs Code Red Entertainment, his label which released Cappadonna's The Struggle album.

Shkreli, 40, became notorious and gained the sobriquet “pharma bro” when, as chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals in 2015, he raised the price of the newly acquired antiparasitic drug Daraprim overnight to $750 per tablet from $17.50.

It costs $4 million dollars! Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is the seventh studio album by the American hip hop group Wu-Tang Clan. Only one physical copy of the album was created as an 'art piece' or you could say, as the original NFT, with no ability to download or stream it digitally.

Leader of hiphop collective Wu-Tang Clan, Robert 'RZA' Diggs and producer Tarik 'Cilvaringz' Azzougarh, decided to keep the 31-track album secret as a protest against what they saw as the devaluation of music in the digital era.