I've never had an iPod (even as a kid, I had to be "that guy" being different, with my Creative ZEN mp3 player), but my understanding is that the U2 album was something that was pushed out to everyone, not pre-loaded, correct? Maybe I'm misremembering.

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]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobo_eReader#Kobo_eReader