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I'm a little confused here. The initial takedown request was from a law-enforcement entity in the UK, citing UK law: "Copyright, Design & Patents Act 1988, Offences under the Fraud Act 2006 and Conspiracy to Defraud".

And yet the repo owner was able to use a DMCA counternotice (a US thing) to restore the site? That... doesn't really make sense? Why would GitHub honor a DMCA counternotice when the takedown was not the result of a DMCA takedown request?

I do wonder if GitHub has opened themselves up to legal liability in the UK because of this (where I presume they, or Microsoft, have business entities). Either that, or this article is getting some of the facts or details wrong.

The initial takedown request was a DMCA takedown request, it just was from the City of London Police and cited the aforementioned UK laws.

See:

https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2023/01/2023-01-1...

I found it strange that a city police force would even care about something like this. It turns out that the City of London is distinct from the city named London. It is more like a chamber of commerce with police power. Bizarre.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London

Surprising that the repo owner typoed the domain name in the counter notice
Hooray!