DMCA 1201 has nothing to do with Popcorn Time. That covers DRM circumvention (and should be repealed). The theory of liability for Popcorn Time is under the Grokster ruling, if the authors are inducing copyright infringement by promoting the tool for that purpose.
The notice and takedown provision is DMCA 512, which is a safe harbor for hosts like Github. It says (roughly) that you aren't liable for copyright infringement of your users if you timely respond to take down notices. But Github wouldn't be liable for copyright infringement anyway because the Popcorn Time software is not copyrighted by the claimants and Github isn't the party allegedly inducing copyright infringement. So Github apparently doesn't have to comply with the notice if they don't want to.
Of course, almost everyone complies with all notices whatsoever regardless of how absurd or invalid they are, because the host doesn't have a strong enough incentive to fight somebody else's battle. That's the free speech issue.
Safe Harbor doesn't give GitHub the authority to decide whether the notice would hold up in court; they need to comply with properly formatted notices if they want to keep their safe harbor status
Is it really that draconian? So, if I find a blog post on github pages that I don't like, I'll just submit a completely bogus claim of copyright infringement, and it'll be gone? (I realize that fraudulent DMCA takedown notices are supposedly illegal, in order to "prevent" such abuse).
As implied by other comments, this is clearly not a valid notice: it would either have to be a claim that the code itself was infringing, or that it constitutes a DRM circumvention tool (like DeCSS). Neither is the case here, as far as I can tell.
In any case, if this software is illegal under the DMCA, so would the "cp" command be -- as it can be used to make copies of copyrighted contents (note that neither tool circumvents DRM).
DMCA 1201 has nothing to do with Popcorn Time. That covers DRM circumvention (and should be repealed). The theory of liability for Popcorn Time is under the Grokster ruling, if the authors are inducing copyright infringement by promoting the tool for that purpose.
The notice and takedown provision is DMCA 512, which is a safe harbor for hosts like Github. It says (roughly) that you aren't liable for copyright infringement of your users if you timely respond to take down notices. But Github wouldn't be liable for copyright infringement anyway because the Popcorn Time software is not copyrighted by the claimants and Github isn't the party allegedly inducing copyright infringement. So Github apparently doesn't have to comply with the notice if they don't want to.
Of course, almost everyone complies with all notices whatsoever regardless of how absurd or invalid they are, because the host doesn't have a strong enough incentive to fight somebody else's battle. That's the free speech issue.