Is Downloading YT videos safe?

[MrFixitBlankFace]

I was just wondering is downloading youtube videos on Yout or Vidpaw safe or is there some sort of copyright penalty that will be issued.

Everyone does it.

 

 

[mxk]

I'm pretty sure it's against YT's terms of service but I could be wrong. I know that they don't want you to do it.

 

A lot of the sites for it are malicious, too.

[duncannah]

Yep, it's totally safe. They won't come after an individual unless you redistribute it or something, just like any other copyrighted material.

[MrFixitBlankFace]

Just now, duncannah said:

Yep, it's totally safe. They won't come after an individual unless you redistribute it or something, just like any other copyrighted material.

Well the people who do it redistribute it.

But whenever that happens its forcibly removed

 

I think I'll just bookmark pages.:)

[Fasauceome]

Funny you mention that, I just downloaded a YouTube video recently.

 

If YouTube has a problem with it, I don't really care. I got memes to make.

[IAmAndre]

If YouTube wanted to prevent users to download videos from their platform, they probably would have found a way to block this. I think it's fine as long as long as you don't do something that's against their ToS like republishing them or making money out of them.

[pizapower]

It's legal. How else all those famous YouTubers make reaction videos.

[Firewrath9]

3 minutes ago, pizapower said:

It's legal. How else all those famous YouTubers make reaction videos.

they watch the youtube video, and record themselves?

 

its technically illegal, but they aren't going to spend thousands on lawyers to sue and individual, and beside, you can always just say you didn't know.

[NinJake]

 

but......

[mariushm]

I don't understand why you don't simply use an extension for your browser, or for example a download manager like jDownloader

 

Here's jDownloader when I enter a youtube link : 

 

 

^ and you can click on those tiny arrows in the Variant column to select the audio and video.

From Youtube's point of view, it's the same thing as viewing the video in your browser, it can't tell the difference, so the legality of it doesn't matter.

In theory it's against the terms of service to download videos, but legal... it may or may not be legal in your country, they're two different things.

 

As for browser extensions, I'm using Firefox as my regular web browser and this extension works great for me : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube_downloader_webx/

It simply adds a button in the area where the url and search boxes are, you click on it when you want to download something, and you pick the format you want:

 

^ I went into the extension options and disabled formats I don't care about, so there's only 2 pages... normally for some videos there's up to 4-5 pages with various formats.

The extension can download audio and video separately and then combine them once they're both downloaded on your hard drive, into a perfectly functional video.

Again, from Youtube's point of view, it's the same as watching the video in your browser..

[MrFixitBlankFace]

3 hours ago, NinJake said:

 

There you have it folks...

I'll stick with bookmarks.  I'm not a meme guy or anything like that.

THANKS

[LogicalDrm]

16 hours ago, pizapower said:

It's legal. How else all those famous YouTubers make reaction videos.

 

Youtube only allows downloads if you pay for Red service. So using 3rd party sites isn't "legal" in US, or any other country with strict copyright laws. As you aren't paying to Youtube or creator directly for consuming content. If you would be directly paying, then it would be different.

 

If you have watched any reaction-type videos, you should already know that they play content directly from source, most of the time.

 

15 hours ago, mariushm said:

I don't understand why you don't simply use an extension for your browser, or for example a download manager like jDownloader

 

The questions wasn't about whether those sites install or download something unwanted. It was about copyright and/or ToS of youtube. Read first, post after.

[mariushm]

13 minutes ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

Youtube only allows downloads if you pay for Red service. So using 3rd party sites isn't "legal" in US, or any other country with strict copyright laws. As you aren't paying to Youtube or creator directly for consuming content. If you would be directly paying, then it would be different.

 

In some countries, downloading of copyrighted work is legal, while uploading is not. 

In some countries, it's legal to copy or use segments of works for various reasons like educational, critique, news etc ... if you want, compare it to a person renting a book from the library and then copying some paragraphs to use in homework or for work (if you're working for a magazine or newspaper, let's say you're writing a book review for said newspaper or magazine)

 

People have to understand the distinction between what's LEGAL in their country and what a site's terms of service are - those are not LEGAL things as in "a law made by your country".

For example, Youtube may say in their terms of service "You may not upload videos on Tuesdays on our site" - that doesn't make it ILLEGAL to upload videos, it's just something Youtube makes up and may enforce.

If you don't respect and follow what Youtube says, Youtube may take corrective measures like cancelling your subscription (banning you, closing your account) but it doesn't necessarily mean you're breaking the laws in your country.

 

Let me ask you this: if you browse to Youtube in incognito mode / anoymous, and you're not logged in into Youtube, did you at any point read the terms of service, did you agree to anything?

I don't think so... therefore, IF downloading/viewing the video is LEGAL in your country for various reasons (as I explained) then you shouldn't worry too much about saving videos from Youtube.

 

You can put a video in full screen, hit play and then point a video camera or your phone to the screen and record the screen. You can use OBS to capture the screen while playing a video in full screen... you can use a HDMI capture card to capture the HDMI output of your PC to a second PC.

In various countries, it's LEGAL for you to do this, for specific reasons as I explained (critique, news, review purposes, some other FAIR USE reasons).

 

There's some fineprint, in some countries it's illegal to break DRM, so for example if Youtube would enable HDCP when playing videos and your HDMI capture card can't capture the monitor output, then you're not allowed to break the HDCP encryption... but you could still film the monitor screen with a phone or camera.

 

Also, Youtube explicitly allows creators to set licenses for their videos which allow sharing and downloading, provided some terms are respected, for example Creative Commons.

 

See https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797468

 

Quote

Creative Commons

Creative Commons licenses provide a standard way for content creators to grant someone else permission to use their work. YouTube allows users to mark their videos with a Creative Commons CC BY license.

If you've marked your video with a CC BY license, you retain your copyright and other users get to reuse your work subject to the terms of the license.

Creative Commons on YouTube

The ability to mark uploaded videos with a Creative Commons license is available to all users.

The standard YouTube license remains the default setting for all uploads. To review the terms of the standard YouTube license, please refer to our Terms of Service.

Because Creative Commons licenses are for your original content, you cannot mark your video with the Creative Commons license if there is a Content ID claim on it.

By marking your original video with a Creative Commons license, you are granting the entire YouTube community the right to reuse and edit that video.

What's eligible for a Creative Commons license

Please understand that you may only mark your uploaded video with a Creative Commons license if it consists entirely of content that can be licensed by you under the CC BY license. Some examples of such licensable content are:

• Your originally created content
• Other videos marked with a CC BY license
• Videos in the public domain

 

So on one hand Youtube does not let you DOWNLOAD videos according to their terms of service, but they allow users to upload videos and mark them as Creative Commons which allows other users to re-use parts of those videos in their videos.  Kind of contradictory...

 

[Loote]

From user point of view, the operation of downloading the video won't be detected by Youtube, so you can have it without any danger. Uploading the same thing on yt would be immediately blocked I suppose, whereas uploading on another platform may lead to someone finding out and is stealing content.

I have some videos of cute girls lipsyncing songs downloaded that they made private some time ago, and I feel dirty just for keeping them, but it's also sort of a collectable. As I go into my favourite videos and see 'some videos have been deleted and are no longer there'(or something like that) message, it's sad because I know that I won't be able to see something I liked ever again.

[Giganthrax]

I don't see how YouTube can penalize you for downloading videos or extracting audio using 3rd party programs such as 4K Video Downloader. Been doing that for years to get music, podcasts to listen to on my phone, and save important videos. Never had any problems. 

 

Also, how can you "redistribute" videos that are already available for free to anyone on youtube? It doesn't make any sense.