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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Darrin Drader" data-source="post: 4751973" data-attributes="member: 7394">It might be impossible for them to track the exact numbers, but they can do the following:1. Have someone actively looking for torrent downloads.2. Have someone torrent the books and leave them seeded.3. Watch to see how many other seeds are out there and how many leeches there are.4. Monitor their torrent client to see what other IP addresses are involved, contact their ISPs to see who they belong to and put the legal the smackdown on them (RIAA anyone?).Or they could just go to the torrent sites, look for the specific book (PHB2) and see how many times the torrent has been downloaded. Many torrent sites do track the number of downloads each file has had. In theory, each download equals one person.Can it be perfectly tracked? No. Impossible.Can you monitor readily available data and get some sort of an idea of what the ratio is? Yes, definitely.The reason that this won't make a difference is that someone will just scan the pages, create a new PDF, and make that available where the original PDF used to be. Or maybe there will be another leak from the printer. I think the only way to crack down on pirating is to get the ISPs to block torrenting, which is far from impossible. Unfortunately a lot of people torrent perfectly legal content including MMO clients and other items that the publishers want distributed in this way.</blockquote>