This morning, a federal judge in Brooklyn ordered Martin Shkreli—the infamous pharmaceutical executive whose attempt to inflate the cost of an HIV drug earned him the nickname “Pharma Bro”—to turn over any and all copies he possesses of an ultra-rare Wu-Tang Clan album titled Once Upon A Time in Shaolin (2015). Shrkeli is also forbidden from streaming or disseminating copies of the record, which was originally auctioned as an edition of one.

The judgment stems from a suit brought by the album’s current owner, a digital collective called PleasrDAO, which claimed that Shkreli maintained unauthorized copies of the album and distributed it without its permission. Judge Pamela Chen ruled from the bench immediately after an oral argument was presented in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York by Steven Cooper, one of the attorneys representing PleasrDAO.

“Today’s ruling by the court is an important victory for our client PleasrDAO, who owns the exclusive rights to the one-of-a-kind-Wu-Tang Clan album,” Cooper said in a statement. (PleasrDAO had lent it for its first museum show recently, sending it to Tasmania to the Museum of Old and New Art for the exhibition “Namedropping.“)

The one known copy of the Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin has been sold to a new owner after being seized by the government. Photo by the United States Marshals Service.

Back in 2015, the Wu-Tang Clan had sold the unique album via the online auction site Paddle8. The idea of selling an album-as-artwork was part of an attempt to forge a new model of support for pop music, modeled on the art world. “In order to take it a few steps forward, why not take it 400 years worth of steps back to the Renaissance age, and look at music as a commissioned commodity, from creation to exhibition to sale,” album producer Tarik “Cilvaringz” Azzougarh said at the time.

However, when the already-infamous Shkreli was revealed as the one behind the winning $2 million bid, it produced considerable anguish and blowback. Years later, in 2017, Shkreli forfeited the album as part of his criminal fraud conviction. It was seized by the U.S. government, which then sold it to PleasrDAO, a group of digital art enthusiasts and cryptocurrency investors, for $4.75 million in 2021.

In June of this year, PleasrDAO sued Skreli, alleging that he had streamed a copy of the music during a “Wu-Tang Official Listening Party” on social media shortly after he was released from prison in May 2022, bragging to his followers that he had made copies that were “hidden in safes all around the world.” (The footage is no longer online, though there remain clips of him previously streaming a piece of the album to celebrate Donald Trump’s victory in 2016.)

In today’s ruling, Judge Chen said that Shrekli must turn over all copies of the album to his attorney within one week and provide an affidavit confirming that he did so. Additionally, she ordered that, within 30 days, Shrkeli provide an inventory of all of the copies of the album he had, whom he distributed them to, and how much money he made from the distribution.

Shrekli’s attorney did not immediately respond to request for comment.