While a lot of people make use of free video downloader to download videos from YouTube, the question that needs to be asked is, Is it really legal to do it? There can be no straight answer to this question and while in some instances, the case is pretty transparent; in others it might be quite complicated.
There are essentially two ways of looking at this:
- • From YouTube’s point of view and
- • The laws of the prevalent country which pertain to this.
YouTube’s view point
When any person watches a video on YouTube, s/he agrees to abide by the rules and regulations set by YouTube. These rules and regulations or Terms of Service set by YouTube say that no videos can be downloaded using a YouTube downloader unless and until there is a download link attached to the said video on the YouTube website. In fact it even forbids copying, reproducing, distributing, transmitting, broadcasting, displaying, selling, licensing or any other forms of exploitation of the content present on YouTube without its consent. These explicit terms leave no room for doubt.
Laws of the land
It has been generally seen that copyright laws of a country dictate it to be absolutely illegal to copy or reproduce content without the consent of the copyright owner. This applies to both personal as well as commercial use video downloads made using online video downloader. This, though puts the viewer who is downloading at risk of actually facing a criminal trial, generally the chances of individual having to face this situation is very slim.
Thus it depends on the morality of the user as to how he interprets the above two situations.
