Is Downloading YouTube Videos for Personal Use Legal?

It's a genuinely reasonable question, and the honest answer is: it depends on what you're downloading, where you live, and what you do with it afterward. "I'm not sharing it with anyone" feels like it should settle the question — it doesn't, on its own, in every jurisdiction.

There are two distinct things worth untangling: YouTube's Terms of Service, which is a private contract between you and YouTube, and copyright law, which is a separate legal framework covering the video's actual content. Violating YouTube's ToS could mean account restrictions from YouTube's side; violating copyright law is a different, legal-system-level issue involving the rights holder. The two overlap but aren't the same thing, and it's worth knowing which one applies to a given concern.

YouTube's Terms of Service generally prohibit downloading video content except through mechanisms YouTube itself provides — its official offline-download feature (available on some videos, largely tied to YouTube Premium) or a video the uploader has explicitly marked downloadable. Using a third-party tool to download a video outside of that is a ToS violation regardless of what you intend to do with the file afterward.

“A ToS violation and a copyright violation are two different questions — this answers only the first one.”

Copyright law is separate from the ToS question, and it's genuinely more complicated across borders. Some countries recognize a private-copying or personal-use exception under specific conditions; many don't, or define it far more narrowly than "I only watched it myself" would suggest. Enforcement against an individual downloading a single video for personal, non-commercial viewing is, in practice, extremely rare — but "rarely enforced" and "legal" aren't the same claim, and the actual rule depends on the specific country you're in.

A few categories carry no real ambiguity either way:

• Your own uploads — you already hold the rights, full stop.
• Creative Commons–licensed videos — the creator has explicitly granted reuse rights, typically requiring attribution.
• Content you have direct, explicit permission from the creator to save.
• Public-domain material, where copyright has expired or never applied.

Check the video's description or license before downloading anything you didn't create — a Creative Commons license is usually stated explicitly. When in doubt, use YouTube's own official offline-download feature where it's available, since that path is licensed by YouTube directly rather than routed around its terms. Open Tools Library's YouTube Video Downloader and YouTube Shorts Downloader are built for the categories above — your own content, Creative Commons material, and anything you have explicit permission for — running entirely from public video URLs, the same content anyone can already watch on youtube.com.