Cover Your Ass
Just because what you do in your side hustle is small doesn’t you don’t need to protect yourself. Anytime you're doing any kind of service, any kind of product, you need to cover your ass with just a few things.
4 things you need in the beginning to protect yourself
Email or even any messenger. any way to have a digital trail on any communication you have. Its good for reminding people what was discussed, show what actually was said, and even if you need to go to court
Contracts can be something actually shown or an agreement with proof that it was agreed to. Yes, it’s better to get something signed. It’s more legal and cannot be disputed. For smaller things, not signing can figure out, but when it comes to things with bigger price tags, you need an actual contract where they sign it.
A website can house all your information, especially your legal stuff. Your return policy, terms and conditions, and policy policies to start off. Make sure all things are kept up to date.
Copyright is its own thing. Though you will need to house that info on your website. Once you make something you have the copyright to it. With any picture you take, art you make, and text you write. Make sure you have that kind of in your contracts. Put that in your emails, put that kind of anywhere you can because have kind of a paper trail kind of have backup that showing that you had this thing first, you're the one who gave them the information. Because this happens to some people, especially when they create like a workbook or an ecourse. Someone else will buy it and copy it almost verbatim like, which is really stupid, where you can check that someone else literally just copied everything you wrote everything you did, and put it on their own thing and sell it as even worse when it's an ecourse.
Never be afraid to take legal action to protect yourself. There are a lot of cheap options for help when you need it. Sometimes you may just need a lawyer to write up a Cease and Desist letter for you to send and that can usually be the end of things.