In the waffle case it's different since they were personally making the waffles and spending the money to give them away. This should not have been interfered w

In the waffle case it's different since they were personally making the waffles and spending the money to give them away. This should not have been interfered with. In an open market, yes. But this was at a municipal festival. It's quite likely that the festival itself was in part funded by fees paid by licensed vendors. You might argue that the festival should be paid for some other way, and maybe that was the point. If so, the protest probably should have included some demonstration of an alternative. If the purpose was to draw a parallel with file-sharing, it missed the mark. The real problem with the modern music industry isn't that people are charging for music, it's that distributors are taking the lion's share of the money when they are no longer needed. They maintain their position artificially through marketing, essentially manipulating demand at the expense of the consumer and the vast majority of artists. Without them, more money would go directly to more artists and there would be fewer mega-acts.