The wild power struggle over the Wu-Tang Clan's secretive, single-copy album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin kicked into high gear again this week, with disgraced pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli filing a counter lawsuit against RZA.
In his new federal court filing obtained by Rolling Stone, Shkreli claims he remains the rightful owner of half of the album's current copyrights, with the other half purportedly due to him 88 years after he purchased the LP in 2015. He claims this even though federal officials seized the album and sold it for $4 million to digital art collective PleasrDAO as part of a 2021 auction organized to pay victims linked to Shkreli's 2017 securities fraud conviction.
With his new counterclaims, Shkreli is asking the court to issue a declaratory judgment confirming his asserted copyright ownership. He contends that RZA and Wu-Tang Clan producer Cilvaringz wrongly reclaimed and resold the copyrights without his knowledge amid his criminal case woes. He says the alleged double-dipping ended with PleasrDAO acquiring the exclusive rights to exploit the album under a purportedly improper "duplicate sale."
Explaining his view of the complicated saga across 35 pages, Shkreli says he paid $1.5 million for the only existing hard copy of the highly anticipated album in 2015 through a byzantine deal with RZA, born Robert Diggs; and Cilvaringz, whose legal name is Tarik Azzougarh; that was "bifurcated" into tangible and intangible deliverables. He alleges the tangible portion included the two-disc set tucked into an engraved nickel-silver box, a gold-leafed certificate of authenticity, and a leather-bound manuscript containing information about the musical work. The intangible side, meanwhile, included his purported immediate grant of 50 percent ownership of the album's copyrights and the promised transfer of the remaining half in 2103, he claims.