2pac’s Mom Files Suit Over Daz Dillinger EP Featuring 2pac

The mother of the late Tupac Shakur, Afeni Shakur,has filed a trademark and copyright infringement lawsuit against rapper Daz Dillinger and his DPG Records for the label’s planned, Makaveli & Dillinger: Don’t Go 2 Sleep. DPG was gearing up to release the EP, which is said to feature previously unreleased songs by Shakur and Dillinger, this Dec. 25.

The suit was filed on Monday and cites unfair competition, trademark dilution, conversion, unjust enrichment, and accounting.

The suit suggests, Dillinger “was hired by a record company to produce certain master sound recordings of musical performances of the late hip-hop music recording artist Tupac Shakur … the subject recordings, which have never been commercially released, were works made-for-hire and Arnaud never had any ownership rights in either the recordings themselves or the performances of Tupac embodied in them. Nevertheless, Arnaud misappropriated the subject recordings and has begun to exploit them for his own commercial gain.”

Only 2,000 copies of the album had been planned for release by Dillinger’s label Web site, www.dpgrecordz.com, who proclaimed in a post on the site earlier in the year, “2Pac’s Makaveli & Dillinger: Don’t Go 2 Sleep is here. Only 2,000 units are being produced, easily making this the rarest and most compelling 2Pac material of all time. It is selling rapidly despite the high price and it is destined to become a hard to find collector’s item after its release. The EP consists of completely new and unheard material that 2Pac recorded during his Makaveli period on Death Row Records. The EP also includes the title track, ‘Don’t Go 2 Sleep,’ which is said to be the most powerful song Tupac Shakur has ever recorded.”