Wu-Tang Clan ‘nothing to F with’ but does PleasrDAO have Shkreli case?

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—by Protos Staff

In a very public tiff, PleasrDAO — an a16z and Paris Hilton-funded ‘DAO’ with 74 members, according to a 2021 New York Times article — has decided to sue Martin ‘Pharma Bro’ Shkreli regarding his distribution of a Wu-Tang album that he originally purchased in 2015.

The album was seized by the US government and sold to PleasrDAO after Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud.

According to the original sale of the album, called Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, it cannot be commercially exploited until the year 2103. Shkreli has streamed portions of the album on YouTube and has admitted to making copies of it and distributing it to friends. It remains unclear if this violates the agreement of the original sale.

A temporary restraining order has been put in place which ensures that — at least for the time being — Shkreli is unable to play the album publicly.

He attempted to sell the album on eBay, where bids hit one million dollars before it was removed from the auction site, back in 2017.

Read more: Martin Shkreli tells reporter to ‘lick my balls,’ New York cancels his crypto event

While it’s impossible to know who will win the case, Shkreli has made it clear that he plans to attack the idea that PleasrDAO is a DAO at all (although, as Hayden Adams of Uniswap pointed out, PleasrDAO has never really been a traditional decentralized autonomous organization) and that with proper due diligence, it would have known that Shkreli had widely distributed it before the DAO purchased the album.

It’s unclear what PleasrDAO hopes to get from Shkreli outside of a few million dollars, at best, as the former pharmaceutical CEO has lost most of his money. Sadly, the former founder and face of PleasrDAO, Jamey Johnson, was placed in a medical coma last year after suffering a serious injury in an ATV accident and hasn’t been heard from since.

Protos reached out to PleasrDAO on X, but it did not comment.

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