Legal & ethical boundaries
General principles, stated plainly. This is not legal advice and does not cite specific statutes — the correct answer always depends on your jurisdiction, and for that you want a lawyer in it, not a website.
1. Copyright is the baseline
Video content is, in most jurisdictions, copyrighted from the moment it's made. The copyright is typically held by the creator or by whoever the creator assigned it to. That means the default position is: you have no right to copy a video unless the rights holder granted one — through a license, a public-domain dedication, or an applicable exception in your local law.
2. "Personal use" is not a universal right
Some countries have private-copy or private-use exceptions that allow copying for personal, non-commercial use under conditions; many do not, or scope them narrowly (e.g., only from lawfully obtained sources). Whether downloading a clip for your own offline viewing is legal where you live is a question only local law answers — and it can differ between the country where you are, where the platform is, and where the content was created.
3. Platform terms are a separate layer
Most platforms' terms of service prohibit downloading or scraping, regardless of what copyright law allows. Breaching a platform's ToS is a contract question between you and the platform (enforcement ranges from account action to, rarely, litigation). A downloader that reads public pages does not change that layer for you as a user.
4. Redistribution is a different animal
Even where personal copying might be defensible in a jurisdiction, re-uploading, sharing, or selling downloaded content is a far less defensible act — it's the act that actually harms the rights holder. If you would not be comfortable with the creator finding your copy on another platform, don't put it there.
5. Real people set their own boundaries
Content featuring identifiable, non-anonymous people carries a consent dimension that fictional or studio content does not. This downloader therefore refuses to support platforms whose core content is real people's material gathered without their participation (leak and stalking aggregators, non-consensual material) — see the status board for the list and reasons. Your own downloads should respect the same line.