The current justification for the fair use exemption within copyright law described it as a means to foster scholarship. On the other hand, publishers tolerate it largely because the work required to collect the copyright payments would be much costlier than the pennies earned from each individual transation. For example, if a vendor expected a royalty payment of $1.00 from each copy made of a paper, the process of collecting and processing the royalty payment from a class of 25 students would be much greater than the $25 earned.

All of the micropayment systems currently under development envision an automated transaction scheme that would transfer the payment with no explicit effort on the part of either the vendor or the viewer. Indeed, fair use doctrines become an obstacle because the micropayment operator would then need to program a complex set of exceptions into the payment system.

The simplest micropayment system would be one that charges a fixed rate (e.g. 25 cents) for every retrieval of a research paper without allowing any exceptions based on the intended use of the document, the number of copies made, or whether the access is for scholarly or commercial interests.

Thus, as micropayments come closer to implementation, we will see publishers making concerted efforts either to restrict the scope of fair use or to abolish it completely.