Licence

The book, the paradox catalogue, the infographics, the charts, and every other piece of writing or visualisation on this site are released under

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

The licence is intentional. The project is pseudonymous and open-access by design; the licence makes that posture legally explicit.

What you can do

• Read it. Anywhere. Anytime. On any device. No registration, no email gate, no paywall.
• Save it. Download pages, save offline copies, archive the site, host a personal mirror.
• Quote it. In writing, in presentations, in policy memos, in conversations. The book and the catalogue are built to be quoted.
• Translate it. Into Dzongkha, Nepali, Tshangla, or any other language. A translation is a derivative work — share it back under the same licence and the project benefits.
• Adapt it. Reorder, abridge, annotate, illustrate, or build something new on top of the underlying argument.
• Redistribute it. Hand a printed copy to a colleague, mail a PDF to a friend, host it on an institutional intranet. As long as the attribution and the licence travel with the work, the project is fine with the redistribution.

The three conditions

The licence carries three conditions. They are short, and they are non-negotiable.

Attribution — BY

Credit the work. The minimum acceptable attribution is:

Right Then, Wrong Now, bht99.com (2026). Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

The pseudonymous discipline means there is no author byline to cite. Cite the project.

NonCommercial — NC

The work cannot be used for commercial purposes without separate permission. This means: no selling the book, no selling derivatives, no including the work inside a paid product, no advertising-supported republication.

The boundary is the standard Creative Commons one: “primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or monetary compensation.” Academic use, journalism, public-interest republication, government policy work, and educational distribution are all permitted. Commercial use is not.

Commercial licensing is available as a separate arrangement. Typical use cases:

• A paid course or training programme that includes the book or selected paradoxes
• A corporate research product that adapts or republishes the structural-diagnosis framework
• An advertising-supported publication that wants to republish chapters
• A consultancy or institutional report that incorporates the paradox catalogue as a foundational reference
• A commercial translation into a language the project has not yet sponsored

The licensing fee is set in proportion to the use case — single-fee for a one-off republication, recurring for a course that runs each cohort, percentage-of-revenue for a derivative product. The conversation starts with hello@bht99.com; a reply within a working week.

Commercial licensing is the project’s most structurally sustainable revenue line. Commercial licensees who want to be acknowledged publicly can be; those who prefer the standard confidential arrangement can too.

ShareAlike — SA

If you adapt, remix, or build upon the work, the derivative must be released under the same licence — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. The project is open access; anything that grows out of it should remain open access.

What the licence does not cover

The licence applies to the content of the site: the book, the paradoxes, the infographic copy, the chart explanations, the glossary entries, the FAQ answers, the methodology page, this licence page itself.

It does not apply to:

• Source data. Numbers cited in the book are drawn from publicly available official sources — the Royal Monetary Authority, the National Statistics Bureau, the Royal Audit Authority, the Ministry of Finance, the World Bank, the IMF, and equivalent counterpart institutions. Each underlying dataset carries the licence of its own publisher. Using the numbers means complying with whatever the original publisher requires.
• Third-party material. The few external photographs, logos, or quotations the site includes (where they appear) are used under fair-use principles or with separate permission. They retain whatever rights their original holders specify.
• The Bht 99 wordmark and the masthead design. The visual identity is the project’s. It is not licensed for reuse on derivative works without separate permission — even though the underlying text is.

Why this licence specifically

A modest pseudonymous open-access project has three concerns:

1. The work should reach anyone who finds it useful. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 lets the work travel without friction — no permissions process, no licence fees, no royalty accounting.
2. The work should not be commodified by anyone else. The NC condition prevents a third party from republishing the book inside a paid product or running advertising against the content.
3. Derivatives should stay open. The SA condition means a translation, an abridgement, or an adaptation cannot be locked behind a more restrictive licence.

The full legal text is at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode. The human-readable summary is at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0.

Questions about a specific use case: hello@bht99.com.