> It’s important to understand, however, that GitHub’s hands are tied in many ways here. If they do not follow the notice and counter notice procedures exactly as outlined in the DMCA law, they risk losing their safe harbor status with the US Copyright Office. Were this to happen, it would be completely disastrous to GitHub as a business.
I believe this is a bit of an exaggeration, because there is no such thing as "safe harbor status with the US Copyright Office". (The author might be thinking of the fact that providers have to register a designated agent with the Copyright Office, for service of infringement reports, in order to benefit from the law.)
The DMCA safe harbor is a legal defense against copyright infringement, and it operates on a case-by-case basis. If GitHub fails to respond to a particular takedown request as it's required to, it loses the ability to assert the safe harbor defense for the allegedly infringing material identified in that request. It does not mean it somehow loses the DMCA protections for any other material that it hosts.
In practice, this means that GitHub employees can make mistakes, or the company can deliberately choose to stand up to superficially-valid DMCA takedowns that it thinks are frivolous, without necessarily posing an existential risk to the entire company.