Worldviews matter a lot - maybe more than anything else - when it comes to competitive strategy. This was highlighted last week as Viacom launched a copyright infringement lawsuit against YouTube and Google claiming $1 billion in damages from the 150,000 clips of their content (in particular, the vast library of MTV programming) that has been collectively viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

Viacom claims that, although YouTube does remove such material if asked, the Google-owned company deliberately puts the burden on the copyright holder, and makes it unreasonably difficult for copyrighted works to be removed. This has led to the fantastic gains in traffic, trending momentum that amounted to a valuation in Google's acquisition of YouTube of $1.65 billion when the companies merged a few months ago despite YouTube's "immaterial" contribution to Google's revenue mix.(read more)