I can't imagine that anyone is going to write a paper and cite a bunch of scholarly articles just to post it here, but takedowns don't explicitly apply to non-U.S. hosts. However, often there are a number of links in the cyber chain between website and viewer, some of which might be U.S. based, and if the copyright holder sends out takedown notices to all of them, one of them might be willing to block access.
It also was helpful to many sites, possibly this one included, that SOPA and PIPA did not pass and evidently died in committee. Those pieces of legislation were designed to allow enhanced enforcement against sites based outside of the U.S. that violate U.S. copyright law. Among other things, they would have required search engines not to find "offending" sites, and require U.S. ISPs to block access.