The mother of Tupac Shakur has filed a lawsuit seeking $1.1million in unpaid royalties from an album released after the rapper’s death. Afeni Shakur, 66, filed the lawsuit against Entertainment One claiming breach of contract for failure to pay royalties on the album Beginnings: The Lost Tapes released in June 2007.
Entertainment One in July bought the rights to Tupac’s music that was previously owned by Death Row Records, according to the lawsuit.
Afeni is co-administrator of her son’s estate and also demanded in her lawsuit that Entertainment One turn over master recordings of all of her son’s unreleased music, according to a report on Wednesday in TMZ.
Telephone calls to Entertainment One were not returned.
The Lost Tapes contained some of the first hip hop songs that Tupac recorded in 1988.
The album featured 10 songs with Tupac’s early crew and prompted Tupac’s joining of the Digital Underground tour as a roadie.
Tupac was shot multiple times in a drive-by shooting on September 7, 1996 while driving in Las Vegas after watching a Mike Tyson boxing match.
The rapper was rushed to a hospital and died six days later.
Afeni and Tupac’s father Billy Garland were active members in the late 1960s and early 1970s of the Black Panther Party in New York City.
Tupac was born a month after Afeni was acquitted of more than 150 charges of conspiring against the US government and New York landmarks in the Panther 21 court case.
Tupac had one of the highest selling hip hop albums of all time with his 2006 double-disc All Eyez on Me and remains a hip hop icon with album sales reaching more than 75 million to date.
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