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LEGAL BRIEF The digital-effects work in the upcoming ''Spider-Man'' has driven one real estate firm up the wall. Sherwood 48 Associates filed a suit against distributor yesterday in federal court in Manhattan, accusing the movie of digitally erasing or replacing three of Sherwood's billboards in Times Square. One of the billboards, which on the street advertises for Sony's electronics rival Samsung, allegedly shows an ad for another sponsor in the film. Another supposedly altered sign is one that touts NBC and was the subject of a similar Sherwood lawsuit two years ago when CBS superimposed its own logo during its millennial New Year's Eve coverage. (Dan Rather later called his network's action a falsification of the news coverage of that event, and the suit was settled out of court.) The ''Spider-Man'' complaint notes that sponsors pay huge premiums for Times Square billboards, not just for exposure to foot and car traffic, but also for exposure in photographs, TV, and movies. The suit seeks not only a court order to bar Sony from showing what Sherwood calls a ''distorted image'' of its properties, but also seeks any profits Sony may earn from the alleged changes, plus an unspecified amount in damages. Sony has not commented on the suit.

TUBE TALK Pack up the Tabasco. ''Roswell'' is headed for that great rerun channel in the sky. Despite being deluged with fan petitions, UPN has canceled the three-year-old series due to low ratings. The hot-sauce-guzzling aliens will bid farewell in a series finale on May 14....

James Gandolfini has bought a bar in the upstate New York college town of Oneonta, and he'll be there at the opening this weekend, the New York Post reports. No word on whether he'll rename the place after his TV watering hole, the Bada Bing club....

This summer's new show ''She Spies'' will be novel, though not for its premise. (''Species'' babe Natasha Henstridge stars as one of three female ex-cons recruited to be secret agents -- think ''Alias'' meets ''Charlie's Angels'' or ''V.I.P.'') Rather, the show will break precedent by debuting in July in primetime on NBC and airing four episodes there before moving directly into syndication on local stations owned by NBC and Hearst-Argyle Television. The hope is that the early network exposure will be enough of a promotional boost for the MGM-produced show's syndicated run of 16 more episodes. It's not clear, though, if viewers will be jolted by the move and have a hard time finding the show after it disappears from NBC's primetime lineup after a month and then shows up elsewhere in syndication a few weeks later.

BABY TALK Maybe she could write a song called ''Building a Nursery.'' In a terse statement on her website, Sarah McLachlan announced that she gave birth to a daughter, India, on Saturday, and that mother and child were ''doing well.'' It's the first child for the 34-year-old singer and her drummer husband, Ashwin Sood, to whom she's been married since 1997. McLachlan had mentioned the possibility of starting a family when she shut down her successful Lilith Fair tours three years ago, and she's hardly been heard from since. While she released a live disc in 1999 and a remix album in 2001, she hasn't put out an album of new material since 1997's smash ''Surfacing.''

PASSING NOTES Louis ''Deke'' Heyward, a prolific TV writer and movie producer in the 1950s and '60s, died at age 81 on April 3 of complications from pneumonia at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. In the '50s, he was a pioneer in what might have been called interactive television, working on shows that dissolved boundaries between performer and audience. He wrote for ''The Ernie Kovacs Show'' (often cited as a comic precursor to David Letterman's late-night antics) and created ''Winky Dink,'' a series that encouraged kids to draw on a plastic sheet placed over their TV screens. In the '60s, he was a producer at American International Pictures, which cranked out such drive-in fare as the beach party movies and the Edgar Allan Poe thrillers that usually starred Vincent Price.