By Jonathan Stempel
NEW YORK, Feb 3 (Reuters) – Martin Shkreli, the convicted former pharmaceutical executive, countersued a digital art collective that paid $4 million for a one-of-a-kind album by the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan.
In a complaint filed late Monday night in Brooklyn federal court, Shkreli also sued Wu-Tang rapper RZA and producer Cilvaringz to undo their alleged “duplicate sale” to the PleasrDAO collective of his 50% interest in copyrights to “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.”
PleasrDAO is a decentralized group that buys what its members view as culturally significant materials.
“Mr. Shkreli’s approach throughout has been to distract and delay with actions that the court has consistently and strenuously rejected,” PleasrDAO’s lawyer Steven Cooper said in an email. “These counterclaims will meet the same fate.”
Representatives for RZA and Cilvaringz did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The countersuit raises the stakes in an unusual battle, over a unique album that Shkreli said he bought for $1.5 million in 2015.
Shkreli, 42, relinquished ownership of “Shaolin” to partially satisfy a forfeiture stemming from his 2017 conviction for defrauding hedge fund investors and scheming to defraud investors in his drugmaker Retrophin.
PleasrDAO paid about $4 million for “Shaolin” in 2021.
It sued Shkreli three years later, saying he violated his 2015 sale contract by livestreaming parts of the album for his followers, apparently from copies.
JUDGE ALLOWED PLEASRDAO TO SUE SHKRELI
In his countersuit, Shkreli said the contract called for his 50% copyright interest to be transferred to him in 2103, when he would be 120 years old.
He said the defendants violated his rights when PleasrDAO paid RZA and Cilvaringz $750,000 for that stake, with RZA and Cilvaringz essentially “selling a total of 150% of the copyrights.”
RZA’s and Cilvaringz’s respective given names are Robert Diggs and Tarik Azzougarh.
Shkreli and PleasrDAO are seeking unspecified damages and profits in their respective lawsuits.
Last September, U.S. District Judge Pamela Chen rejected Shkreli’s bid to dismiss PleasrDAO’s lawsuit, saying the value of “Shaolin” came from the collective’s “ability to exploit its exclusivity to create an ‘experience’ that its competitors cannot.”
Shkreli became known as “Pharma Bro” when, as chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals in 2015, he raised the price of the life-saving antiparasitic drug Daraprim overnight to $750 per tablet from $17.50.
In 2022, Shkreli was released early from his seven-year prison sentence, and banned from the pharmaceutical industry.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Richard Chang and Franklin Paul)
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