It seems that piracy lawsuits are a gate that swings both ways with Warner, Sony BMG, EMI and Universal now facing some fairly hefty bills to remunerate artists whose content, it seems, they’ve pirated.

Usually we tend not to see what happens on the far side of the table, with most of the media attention surrounding record labels and piracy centred quite firmly on the poor souls dragged into court by apparently merciless megapulishers, but now we’re told that record labels are facing the fairly substantial sum of $6 billion in damages to be paid to artists they’re found guilty of pirating roughly 300,000 tracks from.

According to TorrentFreak, some record labels have firmly established a situation whereby artists aren’t consulted in order to secure the rights to put certain tracks on compilations. Instead, those tracks are simply added to a “pending list” and, apparently, forgotten about. That situation, it seems, is the source of the current kafuffle.

It’s always interesting to see the fairly egregious behaviour that publishers can, if all of this is true, manage to get away with for literally decades before there have been any kind of serious repercussions. Still, if nothing else, it’s interesting to see artists getting some well deserved money out of publishers for tracks that appear to have been used without the correct licensing arrangement.

We’ll be very curious to see if the same kind of alleged behaviour continues, given the fairly drastic cost that the record labels involved have incurred for their various licensing infractions. As the TorrentFreak comments section seems to suggest, it seems there are plenty of pirates out there who consider this turn to be good news, or at least, enjoy the irony.

If nothing else, you can read about the case in more detail in the original article over at TorrentFreak.