San Francisco -- Two professors from the City College of San Francisco have agreed to pay $10,000 in attorney's fees and drop their year-old defamation lawsuit against the operator of a Web site that posts anonymous reviews of teachers.

English Professor Daniel Curzon Brown filed the case last October citing vicious attacks on teachers that appeared on the teacherreview.com Web site.

But yesterday Curzon Brown, who in May was joined in the suit by physics Professor David Wall, said the two could not afford to continue the fight. Attorneys representing Ryan Lathouwers, the 27-year-old former computer science student who started the site in 1997, had planned to petition for a dismissal of the suit at a hearing scheduled for today. They were also expected to ask for attorneys' fees in excess of $100,000.

``We couldn't take the risk,'' Curzon Brown said. ``The law protects the stuff on the Internet that it doesn't in all other places. It allows libel and homophobic hate speech. It is open season on teachers.''

The American Civil Liberties Union and Internet experts have lined up with Lathouwers, contending that the site is protected by the First Amendment and that Congress has given Internet service providers immunity from liability if they do not write the material in question.

``What Congress wanted and what the Constitution demands is that people have a lot of freedom to express their opinion on the Internet and anywhere else,'' said Bernard Burk, who along with the ACLU, represents Lathouwers.

Lathouwers, who posts the anonymous reviews and started the site as a way for students to find classes best suited for them, said he was relieved by the settlement.

``I feel that I've been vindicated for providing a forum for students to express their opinions,'' he said. ``I was confident that I was protected by free speech.''

But Curzon Brown and Wall did not believe the opinions posted should be protected. They said anti- gay epithets and statements such as, ``Curzon-Brown ... should get a life and be straight'' and ``Fortunately this creep will probably die of AIDS'' were ``outrageous, malicious and intentional.''

``At some point, the speech becomes actionable. It can cross over the line, and we felt that this did,'' said the professors' attorney Paul Kleven.

Burk said yesterday that because Lathouwers did not write the material in question, his client was not liable for its content.

``It is absolutely a victory for free speech. It is an important lesson about what happens to people who try and censor things they don't agree with on the Internet,'' Burk said.

Curzon Brown originally filed the suit as a class action on behalf of the campus's 1,750 teachers, asking for monetary damages and an injunction to prohibit ``defamatory'' reviews from being posted on the site. After his attorneys quit, he dropped the class-action portion, and Wall joined the amended suit in May.

Burk said the settlement includes a provision barring Curzon Brown and Wall from filing similar suits against teacherreview.com. They can be penalized $75,000 if they do so.

They also agreed to stop posting reviews of themselves on the site, he said