An announcement of intention to sue on the Directors Guild of America website caused CleanFlicks to preemptively file a lawsuit in Denver Federal Court in August 2002. Robert Huntsman, an attorney and inventor affiliated with Cleanflicks who had a DVD-editing patent pending, was named as the lead plaintiff, so the original short caption for the case was Huntsman v. Soderbergh. In their suit, Cleanflicks sought a judgment stating that edited content was legal under federal copyright law. In addition to director Steven Soderbergh, named defendants included Hollywood figures Steven Spielberg, Robert Redford, Sydney Pollack, Robert Altman, John Landis, and Martin Scorsese. Although the chain had been operating for two years, the issue was brought to the spotlight when MovieMask made a series of demonstrations around Hollywood in March of that year. The directors' counter-suit soon followed, but the legal battle stretched on for years.