In recent years, more and more people have been purchasing digital contents through e-commerce. Under this circumstance, anonymous and fair electronic payment schemes are important issue. Recently, Lin et al. proposed an incentive-based electronic payment scheme for digital content transactions over the Internet. They claimed that their scheme can ensure the properties of fair exchange and customer anonymity and encourage authors to create digital contents by apportioning sales revenues immediately to payees when customers complete payments. But in this paper, we show that their scheme is not fair. In their scheme malicious customers may successfully get the digital contents, but merchants and the authors of digital content cannot timely get sale revenue. Furthermore, based on Lin et al.’s scheme, this paper proposes an improved scheme. In improved scheme neither the customer no the merchant has priority. So, the improved is a fair scheme for incentive-based electronic payment of digital content transactions over the Internet.