Abstract

This publication describes an analytical framework for identifying and evaluating benefit–burden decoupling in digital-service transactions, with particular application to attention-economy platforms and conversational AI-companion systems. The framework treats two observed phenomena — the relocation of the paying party from customer to product (wherein a user's attention, data, or disclosure is monetized while the user is denied the status of a served customer), and the relocation of responsibility from maker to user (wherein a provider retains the financial benefit of a design or deployment decision while attempting, via terms-of-service disclaimers and "sole-risk" framing, to shed the decision's downstream burdens) — as two instances of a single operation. The framework formalizes a conservation principle under which agency and responsibility constitute one quantity that cannot be captured on the benefit side and disclaimed on the burden side, and applies this principle to map responsibility across the actors in an AI-service supply chain (open publisher, deploying maker, regulator, and end user). The framework further provides a test for when contractual disclaimers of statutory duty are ineffective, and situates the product-versus-service classification question as determinative of whether a given harm is legally cognizable. The disclosed framework is useful for legal analysis, policy design, product-governance review, and the construction of accountability-preserving deployment architectures.

Disclosure note (for reviewer): This is a defensive publication of an analytical framework and method of analysis, not of a physical apparatus. It is submitted to establish dated, attributed prior art on the framework and its constituent tests, and is released CC-BY-4.0.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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