It’s only for personal use, taken from YouTube videos that are already available to everyone for free. Does that change anything, or is it still illegal?

Technically it is illegal, under the Copyright Amendment Act 2006.

As TheOneWes said, YouTube is not free. Artists get paid from either Premium subscriptions or ad revenues, so saving it to a different medium violates anti-circumvention sections of the CAA by preventing artists from receiving revenue for you listening to their music.

I’m not Australian, so I’m not sure how prolific that is or how actively local authorities prosecute such actions, but I cannot imagine anyone 1) founding out you did it and 2) caring enough to go through the effort of fining/prosecuting/jailing you for saving a few songs to listen to.

No, every time you watch a video you actually download it in chunks. It’s illegal to redistribute the said video or make money off it without permission from the creator. That’s called stealing. Apart from that you are free to do whatever you like, YT ToS might say otherwise but thankfully Google isn’t an authority yet.

I've got about 4tb of youtube videos downloaded and haven't had any issues yet

Not illegal, but against their terms of service. Worst they can do is ban you; you’ll be fine.

No they don't. They can't distinguish between normal views and downloads, because normal views also download the video temporarily.

Super illegal. Like 10 years maximum security prison stuff man. /s

Who cares? And who would even know?

Depends how you download them if you do it through the download feature through premium than no however if you use an external website to bypass this then I would imagine it would be.

It depends on how you are planning to use downloaded files.

If he made a video and all the content in it, he owns the copyright for that video. That’s the power of law. He has it.

But most people don’t get caught downloading video. It’s if you tried to upload his video that you would be dinged. (The reason torrenters get ISP warnings is because they’re uploading as well…)

Copyright, parents, and trademarks are three different things. Copyright protection is automatic - nobody has to get a patent or trademark in order to have the protection of copyright law for their work.

Nobody here (or anywhere else) can tell you whether or not you will get in trouble for downloading copyrighted content.

Assuming the US, all content is copywritten the moment its put into tangible form.

If you want to take from them, you dont need this subreddit to rationalize it for you.

Downloading Youtube videos is illegal in many jurisdictions no matter whether it's a 'for profit' channel or not.

In some places you would have the defence of it being for personal use, but in many you wouldn't.

Nothing sketchy about youtube-dl (and its forks and off-shoots)

https://tartube.sourceforge.io/

Youtube-dl combined with youtube-dlg should fit your needs, best part is it can take videos from MANY other websites

It is illegal due to copyright.

If you're watching it offline, you can't see the ads.

It’s not necessarily illegal, plenty of legal jurisdictions allow you to keep a personal copy of material you’ve been given access to. Sharing that copy with others will typically be illegal though.

From a technical perspective your device also downloads a copy of a video when you watch it, it just doesn’t save it to permanent storage.

YouTube makes it difficult to download videos because they have no business interest in people doing that, they want you to use YouTube to watch their content. But them not liking something is not the same as it being illegal.

It's disallowed by their terms of service, so you could potentially find your access to the service revoked.

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Author: /u/norvad

Title: Can someone clarify? downloading from Youtube is legal unless you post it somewhere and financially benefit from it?

Original Post:

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You can download YouTube videos with Keeprix Video Downloader. The safest tool I've ever use

You won't get problem for downloading from YouTube. You have several options:

Desktop

1. YT-DLP
2. Cobalt.tools
3. Lucida
4. My own developed app MediaHarbor

Mobile

1. Seal
2. YTDlnis
3. Newpipe
4. Cobalt.tools

I use https://appsgolem.com/en/cut-youtube-video/ , work well, can select the format resolution.

sudo apt update -y
sudo apt install -y python3-pip
pip install yt-dlp
yt-dlp https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=PrsLux79e9vt85p9

enjoy!!!

Head over to r/youtubedl

As of 3am (UK time) 16th March 2025, Youtube has blocked all third party downloading. I'm using WinX, Any Video and J Downloader. I'm switching to yt-dl once I've done the dummy guide (I'm a noob made fat and lazy by using apps since 2008). This blocking of Youtube is a crime, most of the vids I download are missing media (old TV shows/TV clips/ lost albums). It's nothing more than cloaked censorship under the guise of 'copyright'.

Out of curiosity - what on earth are you downloading that it's over 50GB a day ? I download videos for archival purposes too, but nowhere near as much. What are you even storing them all on ? Do you just have cabinets full of hard drives ?

Not trying to be a dick, I'm just curious. Tbh thanks for doing it ! I wish more people archived stuff they enjoy watching, it sucks how much savable stuff becomes lost media.

I run 60 second sleep intervals and requests that rezult in about 10 videos per hour not logged in.

I run this 24/7 constantly without any flaws that are not the rezult of my ISP doing a daily network reset in the wee hours in the morning, which my setup recovers without help.

You may wish to restrict your bandwidth if you have a fast system. I use an old slow laptop for this that only has WIFI 2 (about 10mb/s) so I don't bother with speed restrictions.

I automatically send all my age restricted videos to a folder and run them the same way as signed in, once a week, which takes about 8 hours.

I average about 100 gigs worth of videos every week.

And I still find I can't watch them all....

I had this conversation pretty much in depth yesterday. So i will briefly treat it --
they do no seem to care how much i download in science shows, etc.
They also did not seem to care how much classical, jazz, boogie-woogie music i download

BUT, when i came across a site named "tunefind" and it claimed to have ALL music for the tv series,and movies they treated (like the FARGO series and CHRISTINE movie) they turned their Eye of Sauron on me.
They got progressively worse as to the amount I could get before I started getting "forbidden" and "please sign in" banners. I think the lowest i ever saw was 3 songs before i had to wait for a couple of hours before they reset their counters -- that amount of time before "reset" got worse, too..
When i stopped with the current music, they seemed to regain disinterest in me.

I use what's essentially just a web UI to YT-DLP with some media management capabilities thrown in called TubeArchivist. I got about 1500 videos downloaded across 3 days before my IP got blocked (no cookie/account supplied). Not a hard block, but I have a static IP and wasn't using a VPN, so it does affect my actual, personal, home network. It should drop off in a week, though.

After that I dialed it back and set a 30 second delay between calls to YouTube, which seems to be what sets off the first set of alarm bells. I've also moved from downloading mostly shorts, to mostly longform 4k vlogs, each several GB in size. That possibly helps.

At the moment, I'm downloading about 200gb per day, which is about 100 individual videos. There's a 30 second ratelimit between requests to YouTube, but that has a give or take allowance of 15 seconds (so requests will be made at a random point every 15-45 seconds), which definitely helps. I don't use a cookie at the moment, but do use a vpn

I simply googled “How to download a YouTube video” and hundreds of tutorials come up. Did none of those work?

I know this is not a convenient option, but in the past I would play the video on my PC while recording it on my cell phone. Then I could just download the video right off my phone.

I capture and clip videos with ShareX. It has a ton of options and is free.

Narrator: the answer was on YouTube.

I use 4K Video Downloader - YouTube and Vimeo are both supported by it. As for copyright infringements, as far as I know, if the videos are protected they are not downloaded. Like from YouTube Movies - you can't download any of the videos there - the file will be corrupted. The rest of the videos can be easily download.