There are permits that you can apply for to legally "occupy" a city space for a protest....for a finite length of time.   That is the legal way.  But, being that it was Austin (with a long-standing hippie tradition....keep Austin weird tradition), I was OK with the protests...for awhile.  It was time for the activists (if there were any true ones left) to move on to other methods of change:  letter writing campaigns, local media use, not to say blogging :-).