A method and system are provided for monitoring use of a licensed digital good, such as software, digital audio or video, text, and web pages. Each licensed digital good is associated with a shared resource, such as a record in a remote database in a license server. The shared resource is updated with data, such as a sequence or periodic transmission, from each instance of the licensed digital good when each instance is used. By detecting if the data in the shared resource has experienced a race condition, the use of multiple instances of the licensed digital good is detected. The method and system can also be used to determine a number of unlicensed uses of the digital good for purposes of automatically selling additional licenses.