It seems that Rapidshare has broken its losing streak on legal fights this week, with word that the file hosting company has won its most recent case in the US.

Word of the victory comes via the ZeroPaid, and marks the first victory after a string of defeats for file hosting company Rapidshare, which has recently lost out both to book and music publishers. In both cases, the company has been made to remove files whose names correspond to the offending content, with Rapidshare promising to ‘actively’ police its content. Rumour has it that the service has also contacted some users who it believes have uploaded copyrighted content, threatening to cancel accounts.

This time around, the case was brought against the filesharing service by another publisher, in the form of pornography outlet Perfect 10. The big difference is that Perfect 10 didn’t allege that Rapidshare was guilty of distributing its content, as other publishers have managed successfully. Instead, Perfect 10 contested that Rapidshare should be made to cease the hosting and distribution of adult content. The complaint was, apparently made on the basis that Rapidshare’s service constituted unfair competition with Perfect 10’s for-pay ‘service.’

Of course, that particular suit proved a little harder to make stick than the claims of copyright infringement, and Rapidshare managed to eke out a victory when it turned out that Perfect 10 couldn’t prove that there had actually been any copyright infringement of its content on Rapidshare’s part.

Had Perfect 10 managed to win a case on the sole basis that Rapidshare offers a service that could potentially have negatively impacted its business, things would have grown very interesting indeed. As it is, Rapidshare’s attorney, Daniel Raimer remarked,

“In passing this decision, the Californian Court has accepted the same line of argument which underpinned the recent landmark decision of the Higher Regional Court in Dusseldorf in the appeal against Capelight pictures.”