On 22 January 2014 01:49, Andrew Lih <andrew@andrewlih.com> wrote:
Yes, that's related to copyright and permissions of the material, but what about that first sentence:

You shall not download any Content unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube on the Service for that Content


Jan pointed out that youtube2mediawiki.py doesn't actually "download" the video, so I think we're fine with the provisions of licensor's permission in the sentence below.

Well not exactly -- just because the downloading is modularized into a Python script doesn't mean it's not downloading. :) The exact code actually does download:

#download video and save to file.
        u = self.opener.open(url)
        f = open(filename, 'w')
        data = True
        while data:
            data = u.read(4096)
            f.write(data)
        f.close()
        u.close()
        return True
 
Commons is ultra-conservative with copyright, but doesn't really care about any other terms and conditions imposed by anyone else. So I think it's fine to transfer the videos from YouTube to Commons - no copyright is violated and the ambiguity in the YouTube TOS works in our favour.

Yes, I do believe there's not much to worry about in this particular situation. Just be aware that we're running afoul of the TOS, even if Google is lax on enforcement. A violation of TOS could be used to go after users in other less clear-cut cases.

-Andrew