Nitke, who is on the faculty of a visual arts school and president of the Camera Club of New York, challenged the CDA because she maintained a Web site that displayed her photographs, which she claimed had artistic merit. Another plaintiff in the litigation was the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF), a not-for-profit organization that sought to fight discrimination against non-mainstream sexual practices. Some of NCSF's members maintained Web sites that contained sexually explicit content. Nitke and NCSF filed the lawsuit in 2001, which did not come to trial until October 2004 before Circuit Court Judge Robert Sack and District Court Judes Richard Berman and Gerard Lynch.