AS THE WORLDWIDE WEB TURNS

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

Lots of folks enjoy the campy, vampy antics of Fox TV's prime-time soap opera Melrose Place. Not me. Instead, I've been glued to a true-life Web spin-off that's even sudsier than the real thing. The bad guys are a powerful-but-out-of-touch Hollywood media Goliath and the clueless lawyers who do his evil bidding. The hero is a digital David, an aspiring and nearly penniless (at least compared with Aaron Spelling) writer who's about to be dragged into court by Goliath's henchmen. Best of all, there are no commercials.

Here's the plot so far: three years ago, Melrose Place fanatic Ken Hart, a regular guy (though he claims he was reared by mountain goats at the Bronx Zoo), was living in Boston, when a co-worker and co-fan moaned that she had missed the previous night's episode. Faster than you can say "Courtney Thorne-Smith," Hart whipped off an E-mail recap of the episode, which he "spiced up a little" with his own wry commentary. His first recap was so well received that he did it again the next week and the week after that. To no one's surprise but Hart's, his plot spots (available at www.mindspring.com/~khart/recaps soon found a wide audience.

Hart began publishing his pieces electronically--strictly for pleasure, not profit. Indeed, he warned readers that if he caught anyone trying to poach his stuff, he would "hunt them down like the suture-headed mutants they are." Two years later, his site was drawing a couple thousand visitors a day. Until, that is, the evil lawyers interceded.

In August, Hart and his Internet service provider got a letter from an attorney for Spelling Entertainment Group advising them that Hart's summaries constituted "unauthorized derivative works of the property" and that unless he removed them from the Web by the end of the month--just before the sixth-season premiere!--Spelling would "take appropriate action." Hart called Greer Bosworth, the lawyer who had signed the letter, and asked, Why? What for? What's the problem? Bosworth said she thought the letter was pretty self-explanatory. It wasn't. There are dozens of Melrose Place-centric Websites out there, including sites devoted entirely to Heather Locklear, Daphne Zuniga and Laura Leighton. Why pick on Hart?

Could it be that Hart's irreverent Web page was drawing traffic away from melroseplacetv.com the dull-as-Pravda official MP site? I tried to reach Bosworth for comment, but she wouldn't take my call. Bosworth referred me instead to a Spelling spokeswoman, who also couldn't say what, exactly, the problem was. ("I'm not a lawyer" was her line.)

Meanwhile, Hart's Website provider has ordered him to take his stuff off the Web. Instead, Hart has moved it to its current site and vowed to stare down the Beverly Hills barristers and, if necessary, Spelling himself. Stay tuned--to Hart's Website, not Fox's soap.

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