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I am not a lawyer and this should not be taken as legal advice, but I have skimmed the entirety of the DMCA.

This is not really a DMCA takedown. The City of London Police, Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) is pretending to make a DMCA notice to instead claim that Github is in violation of the UK law "Copyright, Design & Patents Act 1988, Offences under the Fraud Act 2006 and Conspiracy to Defraud" if they do not remove the site.

The DMCA does not make any general provisions for notices and compliance to foreign laws. I don't know what the laws are in the UK, but the UK should have some method like the DMCA for providing a notice to a hosting company to warn it of liability.

I don't think mixing a UK law based complaint into a DMCA (a US law) process is a good idea. It does seem possible that the PIPCU might have sent a differently formatted notice and been requested by Github to format it as a DMCA notice. In which case the actual text of DMCA is completely irrelevant.

Github posts these notices in a redacted form:

  Notice: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2023/01/2023-01-11-piratebay.md

  Counter Notice: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2023/01/2023-01-18-piratebay-counternotice.md