I did read the comment to the end and could summarize it as "licensing copying in any form may generalize into licensing any activity in every form".

What seems to be overlooked here is the possibility to charge on any commercial use of copyrighted material. For the case in hand that could take a form of a tax on kindergarten fees giving them a license to copy whatever sheet music they might need.

This is the scheme that is being instated in Russia under the new civil code, where copyright payments have taken a form of a tax collected by a private company under a contract with the government (more or less as parking fees are collected in Britain and elsewhere). At the moment the fee applies to sales of any recordable media: CDs, flash memory cards, etc. and is payable by the producer or an importer. It is expected to be extended to the sales of performing equipment, such as media players, audio or video equipment. It is easy to envisage this to continue as a tax on tickets for public performances.

That is precisely how ICQ works

Just to put the story into perspective, it is the same ElcomSoft that was behind Dmitry Sklyarov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitri_Sklyarov) who wrote software to get around the copy protection in Adobe E-book format and was imprisoned in the US for that, becoming the first person to be tried under the DMCA.

> I inevitably get a useless abstract and the offer to sell it to me for something on the order of $20/page

In most cases there will also be a list of authors with their respective e-mail addresses, many of whom would be only happy to send you a copy of the paper.