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Notes

Is it legal to download YouTube videos?

Two separate questions that get answered as one: what YouTube's contract says, and what copyright law says. The honest answer differs by which you mean, and by where you live.

Two answers circulate and both are wrong.

“It’s totally illegal, you’ll get sued.” No. “It’s fine, it’s just your browser cache anyway.” Also no.

The question hides two separate questions with different answers, different consequences, and different people who can act on them. Almost every page on this topic collapses them, which is why the topic stays confusing.

I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and the second question in particular depends on where you live. What follows is the shape of the problem, so you can tell which part of it you are actually in.

The two questions

1. Does it break your agreement with YouTube? A contract question. The other party is Google.

2. Does it infringe copyright? A law question. The other party is whoever owns the video.

You can be in breach of one and not the other. Downloading your own video that you uploaded yourself infringes nobody’s copyright — and still breaches the terms of service. That combination is the clearest proof the two are not the same question.

Question 1: YouTube’s terms

Short and not really disputed. YouTube’s Terms of Service prohibit downloading content except through features YouTube itself provides — the offline feature in the app, YouTube Premium’s downloads, the creator’s own download button when enabled.

Using third-party software to save a video is against the terms. That includes yt-dlp, it includes Downie, and it includes the app I build. Anyone selling you a downloader while implying otherwise is being slippery.

What follows from breaching terms of service: it is a contract matter, not a criminal one. The remedies available to a platform are platform remedies — throttling requests, blocking an address, restricting or terminating an account. Not fines, not prosecution.

This is also why the “sign in to confirm you’re not a bot” error and rate limiting exist at all: they are the enforcement. The technical measures are the response, and they are aimed at requests rather than people.

It is worth understanding why signing in changes the calculation. Downloading while logged out attaches activity to an IP address, which resets. Passing account cookies attaches it to an identity that can be acted against. That is a practical reason to avoid --cookies-from-browser unless a private or members-only video genuinely requires it.

Here it depends entirely on what the video is and where you are.

Cases that are clearly fine

  • Your own uploads. You hold the copyright.
  • Public domain material. Old films, government works in some countries.
  • Creative Commons licensed videos. YouTube has a CC BY option and creators do use it; the licence permits copying, usually with attribution. It is shown in the video’s description.
  • Content you have permission for, in writing, from the rights holder.

In all four, question 1 still applies. The terms of service do not care that you own the copyright.

Cases that are clearly not fine

  • Re-uploading someone’s video, anywhere.
  • Distributing it — sending copies around, seeding it, putting it on a server.
  • Using it commercially without a licence: in a client’s video, in an ad, in something you sell.
  • Circumventing access controls to reach paid or restricted content. In the US this engages the DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules, which are a separate offence from infringement itself and are treated more seriously.

The genuinely unsettled middle

Downloading a copyrighted video, for yourself, to watch offline, and never sharing it.

This is what nearly everyone actually does, and it is the case with no clean answer.

In much of the EU, private copying is recognised. It is written into the 2001 InfoSoc Directive and implemented country by country, often funded by a levy on blank media and storage — you have probably paid it without noticing. In France, copie privée is established, and the levy is why. The exception is generally narrow: for your own private use, from a lawful source, no sharing. Whether a stream counts as a “lawful source” for this purpose is exactly where lawyers disagree, and the Court of Justice has been restrictive about copies made from unlawful sources.

In the UK, this is sharper than people assume: the private copying exception introduced in 2014 was quashed by the High Court in 2015 and never replaced. There is no general private copying right in UK law today.

In the US, there is no private copying exception as such. There is fair use, a four-factor test decided case by case, and the Sony “time-shifting” precedent from 1984 that people cite. Whether it extends to downloading from a streaming service has not been settled, and the anti-circumvention rules are a distinct problem regardless of fair use.

In practice, across all of these: individuals downloading for personal offline viewing are not who rights holders pursue. Enforcement targets distribution and commercial use, because that is where the damage is. That is an observation about what happens, not a statement that it is lawful, and it is the most anyone honest can tell you.

What actually gets people in trouble

Not downloading. The pattern is consistent:

  • Re-uploading to another platform. Content ID finds it, usually within hours.
  • Using footage commercially without clearing it. This is where real money claims come from.
  • Running a public downloading service. Sites in that category have been sued and blocked in several jurisdictions. Notably, the operators are the target — not their users.
  • Distributing at scale.

The individual saving a lecture to watch on a flight is not a category anyone is pursuing.

Practical guidance

Not legal advice, just the sensible reading:

Low risk, in practice: your own videos, Creative Commons material, public domain, personal offline viewing that never leaves your machine.

Do not: re-upload, distribute, use commercially without a licence, or circumvent paywalls and access restrictions.

Think first: unlisted links that were shared privately. They are not access-controlled, which is exactly why the sharer may not have expected copies to exist.

If it is for work, ask. Commercial use is where this stops being theoretical, and a licence usually costs less than the alternative. Note that this is one thing free tools genuinely cannot give you and paid tiers sometimes can — 4K Video Downloader’s Pro tier sells a commercial-use permit, which is a licence for their software, not for the content. That distinction matters and their marketing does not always make it.

What a downloader can and cannot decide

The app I build downloads what you point it at. It does not know whether you hold the rights, and no downloader does — a URL does not carry that information.

So the responsibility sits with the person pasting the link, and any tool claiming to make this legal or safe is claiming something it cannot know. The most a piece of software can honestly do is not lie to you about it.

Which is the reason this page exists in the middle of a site that would rather you downloaded things: the truthful answer is it depends, here is on what, and everything ranking above it says otherwise in one direction or the other.