So, bad enough that there are still plenty of companies out there who don’t get the whole “your URL is public. I can link to it. Now shut up.” concept.

But I was just now presented with an agreement to “sign” (via a pop-up, no less) when clicking a link out of a company’s site. Just in case that’s not clear (or sounds insane), yes, they want to hang some legal baggage on my clicking through them to another site.

In particular, while viewing this page at mindjet.com, I clicked on the “gyronix.com” link. Not a link directly to the other site, of course – a tracking/redirector link, nothing unusual there.

Until the pop-up, that is.

I won’t quote the whole thing (although it would be interesting to learn their views on Fair Use), but the key paragraph (all-caps all theirs) reads:

THIS AGREEMENT IS A LEGALLY BINDING CONTRACT BETWEEN YOU AND MINDJET. BY CLICKING ON THE "I ACCEPT" BUTTON BELOW, OR BY DOWNLOADING, ACCESSING OR USING ANY PART OF THE SOLUTION, YOU ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOU HAVE READ THIS AGREEMENT, THAT YOU UNDERSTAND IT, AND THAT YOU AGREE TO BE LEGALLY BOUND BY ITS TERMS AND CONDITIONS.

“The Solution”. The link to http://www.gyronix.com/. Holy crap.

Go ahead, click. No rights reserved. I hereby dedicate the above link to the public domain.