Martin Shkreli seeks court dismissal of PleasrDAO's lawsuit over ownership of Wu-Tang Clan album

American investor and former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli has asked the Brooklyn federal court to dismiss the lawsuit filed by the Non-fungible Token platform PleasrDAO against him, which involves ownership of an album by the legendary hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan. Shkreli said the lawsuit is "subject to the priority of the Copyright Act." If the trial continues, he hopes that two members of Wu-Tang Clan, Robert Diggs (aka RZA) and Tarik Azzougarh (aka Cilvaringz), will also participate in the lawsuit process because they jointly own this album. Shkreli originally purchased the album for $2 million at a private auction in 2015. According to the terms of the contract, the album will not be publicly released until 2103, so only one copy was made. However, after Shkreli was arrested for allegedly defrauding investors and participating in a stock fraud scheme involving his company Retrophin Inc., the authorities seized this record in 2018. After being convicted, he was sentenced to seven years in prison, ordered to pay a fine of $75,000, and confiscated $7.3 million.

PleasrDAO has owned this physical album since 2021, when it purchased the record from the Department of Justice for $4.75 million after the department confiscated the album from Shkreli following his 2018 conviction for securities fraud. The DAO sold partial ownership through Non-fungible Tokens, but Shkreli claimed to retain a digital copy of the album and filed a lawsuit in June last year. On August 26th, a federal judge in New York ordered Shkreli to "surrender all copies of his album in any form" to his lawyer and sign a declaration stating that he no longer has any copies by August 30th. Shkreli must also submit a list of copies of the album, including information about the people he shared the album with and any financial benefits he obtained from the release or playing of the album, by September 30.