Is Koyote Soft illegal

Answer 1

The short answer: Absolutely.

The long answer:

Koyote Soft provides a few freeware applications that mainly deal with the conversion, encoding, and writing of media files (sound and video). If you're asking specifically about the FLV Converter, the legality of downloading video with it depends on the Terms of Agreement of the website providing the media. If the Terms of Agreement state that you agree to not copy, redistribute, save, etc. their media, you cannot, as you are contractually bound. Websites like YouTube, however, which do not require you to agree to any legal terms, are essentially making their content free to the public, so you can save videos from there without worry. This kind of activity is similar to copying and pasting text from a webpage.

Other programs, like the Free CD Ripper, allow you to rip files from a physical media. The legality of this depends on how you obtained the physical media and the copyright state of its contents. If you bought it from a licensed distributor, you have the right to make a personal copy of the media. This means that you cannot redistribute copies of the copyrighted material without consent of the copyright holder. But if there is no active copyright on the material, it is fair game and can be freely altered, reproduced, redistributed, whatever.

Also, if you're really concerned about it, read up on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_copyright_law