Some may try to hide malware in the files you download, so be sure to only use services you know and trust. Tip: Be aware that not all conversion services are reliable and safe to use. You’re probably better off not risking it at all, but if you want to, there are some relatively safe and easy to use conversion services out there. If you want to convert videos, only do so to ones that are copyright-free. We strongly recommend that you never download anything in violation of copyright law. Whether you want to ignore the legal restrictions or not, there are services that allow you to do so. Below is a chart that simplifies it a little. Videos that meet that criterium can be downloaded legally – however they still violate the terms of service. While in the case of professionally released music and videos it always is, copyright- or royalty-free material does exist. YouTube is covered by US copyright law, which means that no matter where you watch from, that’s the law it falls under.Īs per US law, any sort of conversion or download of copyrighted material, whether it’s as MP3, MP4 or something else entirely – is illegal. The simple fact of it is that, yes, it is illegal. The lawĪll of this doesn’t actually cover whether or not it is legal for John Doe to download a video from YouTube though. At most, they are excluded from Google’s ad network, which means the owners can’t monetise them that way.

This means that it’s against YouTube’s rules to convert or download videos, or even to record them via screen capture – that doesn’t necessarily make it illegal though.Ĭonverter sites obviously violate the terms of service, yet YouTube doesn’t normally prosecute sites that provide this type of service – they are allowed to continue. YouTube’s terms of service forbid the capturing of streams.

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