Aloha Friday: Apologies and NickMom

On Tuesday, after Rosh Hashana services, NHL and I began having a discussion.  As our talk wandered from Rosh Hashana to Yom Kippur, I told NHL that the purpose of Yom Kippur was to apologize for our transgressions.  However, I informed him that saying you are sorry wasn’t enough.  If you were truly sorry, you wouldn’t repeat your misdeeds.

I gave him the example of a bully I had back in middle school.  This bully claimed to be my best friend.  He even acted the part much of the time.  Then, he would begin to mock me, stab me in the back (literally, he used a sharpened pencil), and would torment me in various ways.  After awhile, he apologized.  He claimed that someone had told him that I had said nasty things about him.

Being extremely naïve, I took him back as a friend and everything was fine for awhile until he tormented me again.  The pattern repeated itself over and over.  Tormenting, apology, naive-younger-me refusing to believe that his one friend was really not a friend at all.  Finally, I couldn’t deny it any longer and I refused to accept any more apologies from him.  I finally realized how worthless his apologies were.

Recently, NickMom has raised some folks’ ire.  Amy, aka ResourcefulMommy, has a good summary of what happened.  Short version: NickMom rips off HowToBeADad. NickMom is caught and apologizes.  Then, NickMom is found to be stealing more content.  Including photos of peoples’ kids.  Including photos of peoples’ kids with the watermarks covered over by NickMom.  They apologize again and take it down.  They even issue a blanket statement that they’ll take down any content that the creators complain about.

Here’s the problem, though.  Their apology means nothing.  Of course, they’ll take down the stolen content when people complain about it.  If they don’t, they face copyright infringement fees of $750 – $150,000 per incident.  However, they have shown absolutely no willingness to stop the copying in the first place.  They know that their editors are lifting content and yet they just stay the course.  Without even the slightest bit of effort to change their ways, their apologies mean nothing at all.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: How do you handle an insincere apology?

P.S. If you haven’t already, try out my Twitter applications: FollowerHQ and Rout.

Disclaimer: The "burglar" image above is by tzunghaor and is available through OpenClipArt.org.

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the linky there if you are participating.

Aloha #157