Watching the Jonathan Woss Show last week, I was more than impressed with U2's fabulous live performance, thinking that the Irish supergroup were right back at the top of their form.

Just like the old days, when I first saw them play the Half Moon pub in Herne Hill. One U2 mega-gig since, and I have not bothered to see them play live again - too overblown and impersonal.

Which, some might be concluding, is what Apple - of megabytes rather than mega-gigs - is becoming.

The touchiest and feeliest of all computer manufacturers, Apple has had more than its share of bother of late. On Friday, the company was referred to the European Commission by the Office of Fair Trading after complaints that it is overcharging British customers who use its iTunes website - basically, if you are German or French, you can download the latest U2 tracks for 11p a time less than if you live in the UK.

And the week before, the company was heavily criticised for refusing to sell the charity single Do They Know It's Christmas? at the price agreed by other online music retailers. Although Apple pledged to make good the difference in price to the charity, cynical rivals saw it as a cheap stunt to undercut them and thus boost its market share of this rapidly developing business. What Bono - who appeared on the original LiveAid single 20 years ago as well as the current No1 - makes of all this, Woss never asked.

Which is a pity, since - shades of Nike's use of Revolution two decades ago - Apple have harnessed U2 to promote its iTunes service, and to good effect, since the iPod is rapidly proving itself to be the saviour of the much-admired computer company.

Yet the public warm perception of Apple might just sour a little if they were aware of the heavy-handed tactics the company has used against Benjamin Cohen, a young British tech entrepreneur who brazenly describes himself as "a former teenaged dot.com millionaire" (apparently, at 22, it is only the teenaged bit of the description that is former).

Mr Cohen stands accused by Apple of cybersquatting on the itunes.co.uk domain name. The full story is reported here. Mr Cohen says that is all pish and nonsense, since he established the domain and used it even before Apple's copyright of iTunes was ever publicised four years ago.

Now, it is as difficult to mistake Mr Cohen's iTunes website for the real thing as it is to confuse the north London techno-whizz kid with the England rugby winger of the same name.

Yet, more than 30 lawyers' letters later, with all sorts of legal threats, Mr Cohen is still holding out for the right to use the domain he registered in 2000. Apple's legal attempt to prove he is a cybersquatter, by offering him cash to sell the domain name, has been refused (and besides which, if he were to sell a domain, surely a fair market price would not be unreasonable?).

Now you might have thought that Apple was big enough to shrug off this minor threat, to leave Mr Cohen to get on with his own developing business, and move on.

Our attempts to elicit a comment from Apple have not even been met with the courtesy of a returned call and a "No comment". We wanted to ask whether, given the time of year, Apple could just drop the case altogether as a gesture of goodwill. As Bono might say, do they know it's Christmas?

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