How Can I Disable "Live" Web Links in a PDF

Question

I have a pdf which is assembled from a variety of original documents, including one document that has a dozen or so "live" url links to websites.  I didn't create the document in question, and I don't have access to the original word processing file.
I need to upload the whole document to a website that will not accept pdfs with live links.  (It's a filing in a legal action, and the website is operated by a court.)  The website support people have told me to remove or disable the links.
This ought to be easy, but I can't figure it out.  I can't edit the source document to deactivate the links, (i) becasue I don't have it, and (ii) because it's a part of the record that shouldn't be modified without some form of formal process.
I tried scanning the pages with the links, with the thought that I would replace the original pages with scanned pages.  But the court requires text searchable documents, and the OCR process identified the links as urls and created live links.
If there's a basic setting that turns deactivates web links in the text, I haven't found it.
Grateful for all suggestions.
Tom

Answer 1

Thanks for the thought, but the document in question has already been reviewed by the technical department of the court's website help desk.  They have identified the website addresses in the text as the reason why their system won't accept it and directed me to remove them.  They refer to the addresses as "hyperlinks," which led me to believe that there was a separate link object involved.
However, from what I've learned here tonight, the problem is Acrobat's default behavior in parsing a text string that begins with "http:"
There are a number of ways to handle the problem, all of which involve a little bit of busy work, but it's not a big deal.
It's just it would have been easier if there were some preference I could enable before re-saving the document that did the trick.  Now that I think about it, a programmer could probably create an external routine (I assume such things exist for pdf files?) that would "mask" the http string from the parsing engine, or otherwise instruct the application not to generate a live link.  But such a routine itself would probably be rejected as as "code which may cause an external action," and there's probably no way to distinguish "good" external routines from malware.
Cheers,
Tom