{"id":2020,"date":"2024-07-26T19:33:56","date_gmt":"2024-07-26T19:33:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wu-tang-clan-shaolin-album-private-copies-allowed-says-martin-shkreli\/"},"modified":"2024-07-26T19:33:56","modified_gmt":"2024-07-26T19:33:56","slug":"wu-tang-clan-shaolin-album-private-copies-allowed-says-martin-shkreli","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wu-tang-clan-shaolin-album-private-copies-allowed-says-martin-shkreli\/","title":{"rendered":"Wu-Tang\u00a0Clan Shaolin Album Private Copies Allowed, Says Martin Shkreli"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

\n\tConvicted pharma executive Martin Shkreli<\/strong> is firing back in a lawsuit over Wu-Tang Clan\u2019s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin<\/em>, arguing he had a legal right to retain copies of the one-of-a-kind album even after he handed it over to federal prosecutors.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe filing came a month after Shkreli was sued by PleasrDAO \u2014 a digital art collective that bought the album in 2021 after Shkreli was forced to forfeit it as part of his criminal case. The company is seeking an injunction barring him from leaking the album and forcing him to turn over any copies.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut in an opposition filing on Wednesday (July 24), Shkreli\u2019s attorneys argued that he had been well within his rights when he made copies of the album before<\/em> the forfeiture \u2014 and that he had not been required to turn those copies over to prosecutors.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cDefendant continues to have the right to use them to this day,\u201d Shkreli\u2019s attorneys write.<\/p>\n

\n\tPleasrDAO has argued a leak of the famously secret album would \u201cirreparably harm\u201d its value. But Shkreli\u2019s attorneys say the feds made no promises to Pleasr that they were buying the only copy in existence.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPlaintiff was well aware that its purchase of assets from did not include any promise or expectation of \u2018exclusivity\u2019 or \u2018uniqueness,\u2019\u201d Shkreli\u2019s lawyers write. \u201cIt bought a copy of a musical work that it knew was not unique, and cannot now claim to be irreparably harmed by the existence of its non-uniqueness.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tPleasrDAO sued Shkreli last month over the potential leak of the album, accusing him of violating both their purchase agreement and the federal forfeiture order. They also accused him of violating federal trade secrets law, which protects valuable proprietary information from misappropriation.<\/p>\n

\n\tWu-Tang\u2019s legendary album was recorded in secret and published just once, on a CD secured in an engraved nickel and silver box. Though the group intended the bizarre trappings as a protest against the commodification of music, Shaolin<\/em> later became the ultimate commodity. In 2015, Shkreli \u2014 soon to become infamous as the man who intentionally spiked the price of crucial AIDS medications \u2014 bought it at auction for $2 million.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen it was initially sold, Shaolin <\/em>came with much-discussed stipulations \u2014 namely, that the one-of-a-kind album could not be released to the general public until 2103. But Shkreli\u2019s lawyers say the deal granted him the right to \u201cduplicate or replicate the work for private use.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud in 2017, he forfeited the album to federal prosecutors to help pay his multi-million dollar restitution sentence. Pleasr then bought the album from the government in 2021 for $4 million, and in 2024 acquired the copyrights and other rights to the album for another $750,000.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn Wednesday\u2019s filing, Shkreli\u2019s lawyers argued that when the government sold the album, it expressly told Pleasr that it would not \u201cassume\u201d any of the promises or guarantees that had been made in Shkreli\u2019s original deal with Wu-Tang \u2014 including the claims about the album\u2019s one-of-a-kind status.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt would be fundamentally unfair for this court to restrict Shkreli from his permitted use of the work after the [government] explicitly disclaimed any warranties, described the assets as being sold \u201cAs-Is, Where-Is,\u201d and listed only physical objects to be delivered on the sale of the assets,\u201d his lawyers write.<\/p>\n

\n\tA hearing on the potential injunction is set for next month. A rep for PleasrDAO\u2019s attorneys did not immediately return a request for comment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Convicted pharma executive Martin Shkreli is firing back in a lawsuit over Wu-Tang Clan\u2019s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, arguing he had a legal right to retain […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2021,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1860,2277,2744,1855,1353,2324,1856,2743],"class_list":["post-2020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-album","tag-allowed","tag-copies","tag-martin","tag-private","tag-shaolin","tag-shkreli","tag-wutangclan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2020\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}