Sosumi.
As I understand it, the Beatles music company, Apple Records (or whatever it was) allowed the computer company to use the name on the condition they never got into the music business in any way.
Apple Corps (pronounced like "core" ... get it?) is the Beatles' company. In the '70s, they sued Apple Computer over the name, ultimately settling on the condition that Apple not go into the music business. The precise definition of "music business" was a little vague, which will become important in a couple of paragraphs.
The lawyers reared their ugly torts again in the late '80s, when Apple started building good sound capabilities into Macs and they started to become a favorite MIDI platform for musicians at home and in the studio. Protools, the favorite digital studio suite, is still mostly Mac-based.
After another round of legal wrangling, both sides again settled, and the language was something along the lines that Apple couldn't sell music in any tangible medium (CDs, LPs, tapes) but could be involved in rendering music in digital form.
Then comes the iPod, and iTunes, and the iTunes store. When the iTunes store launched, Apple had agreements with most of the major record labels, but there was a glaring omission -- no Beatles. Nothing from possibly the single most influential rock band ever. That's because the Apple Corps lawyers were feeling frisky again.
They sued, arguing that Apple Computer was stepping on Apple Corps' trademark by selling music under the Apple name. A British court agreed with Apple Corps -- which wouldn't have stopped Apple Computer from selling anything, but would have required them to remove the Apple name and logo. I didn't think that was too huge, because by that time iPod and iTunes were established names of their own, with or without partially eaten fruit on the case.
I dimly recall news of some sort of settlement, but Beatles tracks are still notably absent from the iTunes store.
Then they developed that alert sound. I guess lawyers were pretty nervous about it...so they named it so sue me.
I would go with defiant rather than nervous. Apple Corps' whole business model is based on a fixed amount of intellectual property. There will be no new Beatles songs, so all they can do is remix, relicense and repackage a fixed amount of product. And with the passage of time, the bloom will fade from that rose -- I'd rather have the publishing rights to Stephen King than Charles Dickens.
Apple Computer, on the other hand, is still in the business of making new stuff. They're growing and inventing markets, while Apple Corps is hanging on to a sinking and shrinking one. And the other twist, which Apple Corps doesn't seem to get, is that if they make it difficult or impossible to download Beatles tracks legally, and pay for them, folks will just go to the P2P networks, and they'll get nothing.
I don't have a dog in the fight either way. I'd already bought most of the Beatles albums on CD before the MP3 phenomenon, and I've ripped them to my hard drive and loaded them on my iPod. If a friend of mine wants to listen to "Blackbird" and can't buy it from the iTunes store, I'll send it along for nothing.
Apple Records is suing Apple over the iPod.
And the alert is called Sosumi. I don't use it though since I like the Submarine sound better. Sosumi is just one piano chord. :)