The lawsuit filed by former LSU student Patrick Esfeller claimed the Daily Reveille, its top editors and other employees of the Baton Rouge, La., university were responsible for the comments, but East Baton Rouge District Court Judge Todd Hernandez ruled Tuesday that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects the newspaper and its supervisors from liability for users' comments.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act states that "interactive computer service providers" cannot be treated as the speaker or publisher of information posted by users, and courts have held that this protection applies to newspapers' online comment sections.

"The courts are bound to rule based upon precedent in law," Esfeller said about the decision in an e-mail. "It's too bad they aren't allowed to rule based on ethics."

Esfeller said he now plans to file a lawsuit against the person or people who made the comments — posted between February 2008 and January 2009 — by filing a lawsuit against "Doe," which allows him to use the discovery process to obtain IP addresses and other identifying information.

One comment was posted in January on a story nearly two years old. The effort it takes to find an archived story and make that comment shows the person is deliberately trying to harm his reputation, Esfeller said.

"I'm looking forward to finding out who made that particular comment about me. I have a couple of ideas of who that person may be," he said. "Regardless, I'll find out and they will be held legally accountable ... for their libelous statements that were made about me."

The comments in question were posted in response to stories about Esfeller's ongoing litigation against the university over disciplinary decisions during the 2006-07 school year.

Reveille Editor-in-Chief Kyle Whitfield said it is a relief to be done with the lawsuit, and he hopes the updated comments policy the Reveille implemented earlier this year will prevent this kind of situation from happening again. The volume of comments following Hurricane Katrina forced editors to use automatic posting with a filter that caught profanity.

"As long as they passed the filter they went through, and obviously the filter doesn't catch potentially libelous comments," Whitfield said.

Now an editor has to approve a comment before it will show up online. Whitfield said he understands where Esfeller is coming from and learned from the experience.

"You get a tangible sense of how comments on our Web site can impact someone, and so I've taken that to heart surely," he said.