This was an interesting story I heard where a person hired an individual to apparently create social media posts for him where the transactions was pretty straight forward. The freelancer creates a video for X amount of funds and the client would then use the video online in hopes to boost their business. So it should be clear that the freelancer has no real rights to the work afterwards. But apparently what was happening was the freelancer was literally taking the finished product as is and was uploading it to his own online spaces in an effort to generate say revenue just like the client.
Imagine being paid to make a movie for a person who paid you millions of dollars to do so and in the background you uploaded that whole movie to your own social media accounts to try and generate revenue. That is pretty much what this sounded like. These were just two smaller individuals and not a corporation so you can imagine it wasn’t as formal in terms of having contracts and such.
But that shows the importance of having a contract even if you are just hiring someone to freelance cheaply online nowadays. It should be common sense as the freelancer not to do that, but some people just want to have their cake and eat it too.