Then, have you read “Tragedy of the Commons” article? It’s quite old, but explores beautifully the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently, and solely and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long-term interest for this to happen. You can read the full version here: http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_tragedy_of_the_commons.html

I am not sure that what you describe is “free-riding”. I’d call it entrepreneurship: recognizing potential of combining 2 or more already existing products/services. (Classic examples are: faded blue jeans as recombination of workmen’s clothing and laundry technology borrowed from hospitals and hotels, cellphones as novel combination of the radio and the telephone, and medical devices are combination of both basic life sciences and clinical practice). After all, majority of innovation is based on seeing some novel and unexplored value in already existing resources. It is very rarely that any innovation starts from scratch.

Without Google, all the Internet’s data would not be very useful since we would not be able to mobilize it at will; and without news aggregators, we would miss a great deal of news that are potentially of our interest. It is these services that make already existing data more valuable. So it’s not free-riding, it’s value-adding.

(Thinks raw materials, sun or air – would you call solar panels or windmills free-riders?) Yeah, they might be, but without them, raw energy would be useless for us.