The short answer
In most jurisdictions, downloading a publicly posted video for personal, non-commercial viewing is unlikely to get you in trouble. What reliably gets people sued is the next step: re-uploading, editing into monetized content, or selling copies. The law rarely punishes the saving; it punishes the redistribution.
Personal use vs. redistribution
Copyright gives creators control over copying and public distribution of their work. Keeping a private copy on your own device is treated very differently from putting that copy in front of an audience. Screenshots of a tutorial to rewatch on a flight: fine. Cutting that tutorial into your own paid course: copyright infringement, regardless of whether you credited anyone.
Platform terms still apply
Independent of copyright law, every platform's terms of service prohibit bulk scraping and automated downloading. For an individual saving a clip now and then, enforcement is essentially unheard of. For anything resembling automated mass downloading, expect account bans and — for businesses — real legal exposure. Tools like downer exist for personal convenience, not for harvesting other people's catalogs.
Four questions to ask before saving
- Is this video publicly visible, or am I circumventing a paywall or private account?
- Will the copy stay on my devices, or does it end up in content I publish?
- Am I using it commercially — ads, monetized channels, client work?
- Would the creator reasonably object to what I'm doing with it?
Four honest "personal, private, non-commercial, wouldn't mind" answers and you're in as safe a place as this gray zone allows. Any hesitation on one of these is a signal to either ask the creator for permission or skip the download.
How downer stays on the safe side
downer only touches publicly accessible media: no paywalls bypassed, no private accounts, no DRM. Every download page links to the platform's own terms, and the service refuses content it can't reach without credentials. That boundary is deliberate — it keeps the tool useful for the 99% of cases that are legitimate and useless for the 1% that aren't.