What's the point of a torrent honeypot? It's incredibly trivial to track which IPs are downloading a torrent; operating the site which offers magnet links gives you no additional information whatsoever.
Exactly. If you want to see who's sharing a file you just join the swarm and look at the IPs in your torrent client. There's absolutely zero benefit to running a torrent honeypot. This is all civil copyright infringement anyway.
Well that's just a scam. A honeypot, at least in common parlance on this site, refers to getting a specific group of people to run/interact with something in the interests of compromising their identity and/or blackmailing them. What you're describing is pretty much just the MO of shady torrent sites.
That's not illegal though. The people who are actually seeding the data, that's who the companies can go after, not the people posting files with metadata or magnet links. Sometimes (most of the time) those will be the same people, but that data is easily capturable via the aforementioned methods.