Shipping iPod with Beatles content would have been a really nasty legal knot. Or it would have made the universe implode. One or the other.
> When new sounds for System 7 were created, the sounds were reviewed by Apple's Legal Department who objected that the new sound alert "chime" had a name that was "too musical," under the recent settlement. The creator of the new sound alerts for System 7, Jim Reekes, had grown frustrated with the legal scrutiny and first quipped it should be named "Let It Beep", a pun on The Beatles' "Let It Be". When someone remarked that that would not pass Legal's approval, he remarked, "so sue me". After a brief reflection, he resubmitted the sound's name as sosumi (a homophone of "so sue me"), telling the Legal Department that the name was Japanese and had nothing to do with music.
Amazing?
The problem with the U2 tracks is that 1) they were delivered automatically by surprise and 2) you couldn't refuse them. They were just dropped onto your phone without warning. This is especially egregious when you consider the fact that Apple has been charging an arm and a leg for storage space on phones, so people were left without storage as this album auto downloaded. (see https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2794347/oops...)
Preloads are fine, especially when done tastefully or unobtrusively. Apple didn't do that with the U2 tracks.
FWIW, I'm also a Kobo user, and I've never heard of anyone complaining about the 100 public domain eBooks that were preloaded onto early Kobo devices.[1]