Is it illegal to convert Youtube videos to mp3 format for your iPod?

No. It might have been illegal putting them up on YouTube in the first place, but it’s YouTube’s job to keep it clean of copyright, not yours. If it’s up there, you can assume that it’s legal to use it for your own personal use.

Yes it’s still illegal

@papayalily Thats entirely untrue. An artist can post his/her own songs on youtube as a way to advertise… there is no way you can assume that they want you to be able to download it and use it.

@roundsquare They may not mean for you to, but that doesn’t make it illegal.

@Papayalily. Lol that is great reasoning… I love it

@papayalily Technically, no, but it does mean your reasoning is flawed. Just because its on youtube doesn’t mean its legal to download.

Well from my googling I would say its a gray area.

http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=betamaxcase
“which had to do with the rights of home recordists taping TV programs for personal use. Such copying qualifies as fair use under U.S. copyright law. The same principles would apply to content taken from the Internet, provided the content is legal to begin with.”
So that would imply its legal to download from youtube, the thing is that the content has to be legal to begin with and as most things on youtube are not as such it would probably fall under illegal

Now, can you ever get in trouble for this? No. Your computer already downloads these videos when you view them to a temp file then deletes them. You are just hanging onto them longer. So there is really no way of tracking such thing.

Its really just a moral questions if you want to do it or not.

@uberbatman Ah, of course. I assumed we were talking about things that are generally illegal to download (such as music, etc..). Thats what the OPs question seems to indicate.

That aside, your definitely correct. It would probably be nearly impossible to get caught… though maybe not entirely if use something like keepvid

In this case, they can probably flag the server and any time it hits youtube they can see who is downloading the video. I doubt they’d put this much effort into it since its more efficient to stop youtube from having the content to begin with, but still technically possible.

It very definitely is in a gray area right now. US copyright law is so screwed up that even the courts can’t agree on its interpretation. (Sorry, I don’t have time to do research on citations now, but a general search and read on ‘copyright’ should demonstrate.) Some courts throw out criminal and civil copyright violation lawsuits that other jurisdictions see fit to prosecute diligently. And there seems to be no huge difference, other than the jurisdiction and judge involved.

This is not a legal opinion; I’m not an attorney.

In the past, it has been common practice for ‘fair use’ to include such things as personal copies of freely available recordings, such as “off the radio”, for example, which a lot of us did as teenagers, decades ago. Radio stations would announce a time, for example, when they would play an entire LP recording with no commercial interruption, specifically for users to tape and save—and that was okay with the legal system, even though record producers didn’t much care for it. What the producers failed to realize was that practices such as this gave their labels / artists more exposure and drove up sales, rather than cutting deeply into them, as they feared.

Fast forward to file-sharing on the Web. It used to be that only the big uploaders of copyrighted material to the Web were ever prosecuted. You’d see headline prosecutions of people who posted thousands of copyright-protected works to the Web (for no real return), but never the downloaders of those files. That has started to change, and some downloaders are now being prosecuted under violation of copyright laws. (I’m not sure that these cases have run to conclusion yet.)

I believe (my own, unprofessional opinion) that if works are available on such public sites as Pandora.com, Grooveshark.com, Last.fm, and other such venues, and you can record them from those public sites, you probably won’t be prosecuted in the first place, and can make the ethical case that what you’re doing constitutes ‘fair use’ ... especially if it helps you decide to buy more of an artist’s work, which it certainly does in my case.

I don’t think it’s a big deal. If it’s gonna happen they might as well implement a legal system around it.

Whatever the case nobody’s going to bother tracking you down for it.

Downloading anything that doesn’t contain a download link from YouTube violates their Terms of Service.
“You shall not download any Content unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube on the Service for that Content.” -Terms

@styfle

Your browser automatically caches videos that you watch on Youtube. You can access any video you watch from your own harddrive. In other words, any time you visit Youtube, you automatically violate their terms of service.

Alternatively, you could argue that you aren’t explicitly downloading those videos, and accessing them from your browser cache is not the same as downloading them.

@chocolatechip Where is this cache you speak of?
@styfle A lot of programs don’t download it, they copy it and let you download the copy. Cuz they’re smart like that XD

,

@chocolatechip “Alternatively, you could argue that you aren’t explicitly downloading those videos, and accessing them from your browser cache is not the same as downloading them.”

If I had to guess, this would be the view courts/juries would take. Technically you are downloading things, but its not conceptualized that way. I’m not sure where courts would draw the line, but it might be based on how you view the video. I.e. if you watch a youtube video using youtube thats fine but if you watch it using some other mechanism, thats not.

All hypothesis, but this seems to be one way to keep to the “spirit of the law.”

@chocolatechip And where might these cached videos be located on your drive?

Here is a link for you

It’s a comparison of 5 youtube-to-mp3 converters. The one that I always used has been discontinued by it’s creators.

@kenmc Omg, I love MakeUseOf! Can’t go wrong with their help