Is it legal to download Dailymotion videos?

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The short answer

It depends on whose video it is and what you do with it. Downloading your own uploads, or a video whose owner has given you permission, is clearly fine. Re-uploading or making money from someone else's video without permission is clearly not. In between sits personal offline viewing of other people's videos, where Dailymotion's own terms say no and the law varies by country.

What Dailymotion's Terms of Use say

Dailymotion's Terms of Use are direct about this. In summary, they say that content on the service may not be downloaded, copied, reproduced or redistributed without prior written consent from Dailymotion or its licensors, and they list downloading and disabling content-protection mechanisms among the things users agree not to do.

Dailymotion also offers no offline-download feature of its own. So the platform's position is clear: watching happens on Dailymotion, unless you have permission to do otherwise.

A breach of a website's terms is a matter between you and that website, and it is not the same thing as breaking copyright law. But it is part of the picture, and a guide that left it out would not be giving you the whole answer.

How copyright applies

Separately from Dailymotion's rules, a video is usually protected by copyright, owned by whoever made it or bought the rights. Copyright gives the owner control over copying and distribution. Making a copy without permission is, in principle, something only the owner may authorise.

Many countries carve out exceptions — fair use in the United States, private copying exceptions in parts of Europe, and similar rules elsewhere. They come with conditions that differ from place to place, often including that the source you copy from is lawful and that the copy stays strictly personal. None of them covers re-uploading someone else's work.

Uses that are clearly fine

• Your own uploads. Keeping a copy of a video you made and published — for example, because you lost the original file.
• Videos you have permission for. A creator or company has said yes, in writing ideally, to you saving and using their video.
• Public domain and openly licensed videos. Old films out of copyright, or videos published under a licence that allows copying, within that licence's terms.

Uses that are clearly not

• Re-uploading someone else's video to Dailymotion, YouTube, TikTok or anywhere else.
• Using a downloaded clip in an advert, client work, or monetised content without a licence.
• Compilations, "reaction" re-uploads that are mostly the original, or reposts with the credit removed.
• Selling, sharing or distributing copies.

"It was public" is not a defence for any of these. Dailymotion itself removes copyright-infringing uploads and applies a repeat-infringer policy to the accounts responsible.

What this site does, and does not do

DailymotionDownloader only works with videos Dailymotion serves publicly, one at a time. It does not get past passwords, private links, regional restrictions or rights-holder protection, and it stores nothing. It is built for the uses in the "clearly fine" list above, and our terms of use say so.

If you are a creator and a copy of your video has turned up somewhere it should not be, the platform hosting that copy is the place to file. Our copyright policy explains what we can act on.