Does Google Docs take first publication rights?

My computer is faulty at best. I don't feel safe with my story on it. I save my story on a flash drive, but I fear that the computer might take out my flash drive too. If I posted my book on Google Docs, would it take the first publication rights, even if I set it to private and didn't let anyone see it?|||I believe first publication rights are relevant only for short stories, so if you're not writing those, you have nothing to worry about. But if nobody other than you can access the file(s), then they're not published in any meaningful sense of the word.





You might want to look at Dropbox (www.dropbox.com). This is mainly meant for synchronising files between multiple computers, but works well for backups too. You download a little program to make it work and create a "dropbox" folder on your hard disk. Anything you put in there is automatically uploaded to their server. You can have shared folders that the world can read, but by default everything is private and password-protected.





They give you 2GB of storage (about as much as a flash drive) for free. That will hold your million words of crap :-) many times over. You can pay for more if you need it|||Simple answer: no.





Generally, you don't give away any kind of publication rights unless there is a contract involved.