By now, we've talked about the matter of Intellectual Property and how matters of patent, copyright and trademark all intersect at multiple levels with how people form and maintain their identities online. The mashup culture demonstrates a free and easy access to--and entitlement to--artifacts of culture that they may use at will to create new things from existing works through rearrangement of elements in novel manners.
In the world of software, one long-standing reaction to the corporate domination of Intellectual Property regimes is the concept of "copyleft" to get around this issue through the issuance of a new form of license scheme. The most well-known of these is the Creative Commons license. Because of these schemes, operating systems such as Linux would take off and make the server/network side of the Internet as we know it possible; this was not lost on the people making business decisions.
In the late 1990s, over a decade of deliberate sabotage by the owners of TSR--in the form of careful asset looting coupled with incompetent book-division management and even more incompetent management of its games division--sank the company and put Dungeons & Dragons briefly out of print. (This six-month interval is the first time that the current D&D edition was not on top of the sales chart for tabletop RPGs; White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade took the top spot in that time.) TSR sold itself to Wizards of the Coast, then riding high because of Magic: The Gathering and the booming genre of Collectable Card Games. An executive by the name of Ryan S. Dancey took control of TSR with a mandate to make a new edition of D&D.
After conducting a heretofore unprecedented round of market research, Mr. Dancey came to the conclusion that one of the reasons for TSR's failure was that it produced far too many D&D supplements that competed with each other. He figured that, if there existed a ready-to-go licensing scheme that a five-year-old child could comprehend, Wizards could outsource much of that product to third-party publishers. Making a long story short, he convinced senior management to go with a copyleft scheme and thus did he make way for the creation of both the game engine (the d20 System) and the license scheme (the Open Game License).
Things did not work out as planned. The initial enthusiasm resulted in an explosion of third-party products, all intended to directly support the then-new D&D edition, and thus "spread the wealth" in a manner friendly Wizards' management and to the many smaller privately-held micro-publishers or one-man bands that make up most tabletop RPG outlets. Dancey would go on to say that the long-term goal was to ensure that no one, not even Wizards, could ever destroy D&D ever again- or ever threaten its position as the top dog of tabletop RPGs.
We tabletop gamers are a stupidly fractious lot at times, as are fandoms in general, and the reaction to this was not one of universal welcome. As this is a niche where the distance between insider and outsider is thinner than a single strand of silk, it should not surprise you when I say that even well-known publishers reacted in a way that would be taken as unprofessional in any other commercial publishing or gaming niche. "my hat of d02 know no limit" became a meme amongst us, one that's still got some resonance years after D&D went to its 4th Edition (2008-present).
Corporate life being what it is, Dancey got rotated out of his position at Wizards along with a larger sweep-and-replace of senior management in the wake of Wizards' sale to Hasbro (and subsequent reorganization). A half-reformation (known as "D&D 3.5") dealt a Dolorous Stroke to the burgeoning d20 System aftermarket, and those third-party publishers that survived began doing what Dancey did not believe to be a viable option: using the open elements of D&D to create their own stand-alone games.
In the end, when the current Wizards management decided to abandon the d20 System and the Open Game License when it decided to change over to D&D 4th Edition, Dancey's one true statement came to pass: D&D's 3rd Edition remained in print, slightly revised, by a company that formerly published the support magazines for Wizards (Paizo Publishing) under the brand name "Pathfinder", where it now enjoys being the dominant tabletop RPG (with D&D 4th Edition as #2) as of this fiscal quarter.
(Amongst the other notable games to arise in this era is Spycraft and Mutants & Masterminds.)
The mashup culture in tabletop RPGs still exists, but now it's primarily found in a new subset known as The Old School Renaissance.
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