>Nerds are literalists and also pretty well-versed with   piracy. Why are you wasting breath trying to convince them   that MegaUpload wasn't a hub for piracy? It clearly was.

So? It was also a hub for legitimate file storage. And this is why I keep bringing up other file sharing sites and youtube, as every single argument you're making could equally be applied to them.

  > it only disabled access to it through that one removed link

Which is kind of the whole bloody point. Look at it from a frontend/backend perspective. On the front end, access to a file is removed once a given link is killed. You, nor anybody else in the general public can access the targeted file once that link is dead. Unless the file is either re-uploaded, or another link is found, that is.