Really? I do understand that it could have been handled a little better, but really? Anything slightly negative related to Apple just gets so blown out of proportion, it's ridiculous. Should articles still be written more than a month later about this terrible thing U2 and Apple did, that ruined peoples' lives? This is, in some ways, the very definition of a first world problem. 'I really hate this free thing that was given to me, and now it's going to take me 4 seconds of my life to delete it.' Get over it.

Bono, responding to a fan who called it "rude" to automatically distribute the album to iTunes users:

Oops ... I'm sorry about that. I had this beautiful idea. Might have gotten carried away with ourselves. Artists are prone to that thing. A drop of megalomania, a touch of generosity, a dash of self-promotion, and deep fear that these songs that we poured our life into over the last few years might not be heard. There's a lot of noise out there. I guess, we got a little noisy ourselves to get through it.

Apple should have made the album free to download, and advertised the hell out of it in their iTunes store, but not added it to peoples' purchased history and libraries. Sure. But, I believe the way it was handled was done with the best of intentions and no malice. Hopefully this is the last we hear of it. Not likely.