legal position...

i have bought copies of several programing manuals and books, i would like to make these available on my website. Obviously there is not a chance of me being granted copyright permission to reproduce them.

so if i publish them i am in breach of copyright, but what is the chance of me

* being caught
* being prosecuted

I am in the UK - does this change anything. Does the copyright owner have to request its removal before starting any legal proceedings.

Any advice (especially from any lawyers/solicitors on the board)
would be very much appreciated

If somebody who cares came... Tsk,tsk,tsk..

Most books have a copyright notice to say that the book may not be reproduced, mentioning "electronically", which I assume means that you can't put it online. I'm not sure of the of the copyright laws in the UK, but as Australia is part of the Commonwealth, our laws are often similar.

>>so if i publish them i am in breach of copyright, but what is the chance of me

* being caught
* being prosecuted <<

Being caught? I don't know. Being prosecuted? I think that they would usually request that you take down the books from your site, otherwise they will prosecute. An example of this was a couple of years ago, the Online Guitar Archive (www.olga.net) were sent emails/letters by EMI requesting that the lyrics posted with the guitar tabs be removed. So OLGA took away the lyrics, and weren't prosecuted.