The US District Court of California denied adult entertainment company Perfect 10's request for an injunction against file-sharing service RapidShare on Thursday, saying that the company did not offer sufficient proof that RapidShare itself had infringed on Perfect 10's copyrights.

Perfect 10 filed its lawsuit against RapidShare in late 2009, alleging that the Germany-based service illegally hosted the company's images for its members to distribute and download. Since P10 is a for-pay service, it argued that RapidShare was violating its distribution rights and making money off of its stolen content due to RapidShare's affiliate program that pays members for referring new users.

Perfect 10 also argued that RapidShare had induced users to download its adult content because, after all, RapidShare is good for nothing but copyright infringement. Basically, the mere existence of RapidShare as a file sharing service was equivalent to inducement in P10's eyes.

In her ruling this week, District Judge Marilyn L. Huff said that P10 failed to make a sufficient case of direct infringement against RapidShare, though she did concede that the service had specific knowledge of infringement by its users thanks to the copyright notices sent. She also said that P10 didn't show enough evidence to convince the court of inducement, and that P10 couldn't even show that it would suffer irreparable harm if she didn't order an injunction (the fact that Perfect 10 waited four years from the time it first discovered its content on RapidShare to file a lawsuit didn't help its case). As such, she said the public interest would not be served by an injunction and she therefore denied P10's request.

RapidShare founder Christian Schmid was understandably happy with the decision. "The view that RapidShare does not promote any infringements of copyright, unlike other file-hosts, appears to be gradually catching on," Schmid said in a statement. "It is a milestone for us that this is also happening in the US. We are happy that the court in California has not bought into the odd line of argument put forward by Perfect 10 and we look forward to increasingly emphasise the major difference between RapidShare and illegal share-hosts."

It should be noted that RapidShare's success in this case was in no small part due to P10's inability to successfully follow up on most of its claims. The porn company has a long and somewhat pitiful history of unsuccessfully suing major companies for what it considers copyright infringement. P10 has shown that it will go after anyone associated with a company that might have touched one of its images, including credit card processors (a case the Supreme Court refused to hear). It seems that P10 is a "shoot first, ask questions later" kind of company, and RapidShare should just count itself lucky that it was P10 behind this lawsuit and not a more competent body like the RIAA.

RapidShare has been on a roll lately with court decisions. Earlier this month, a German court ruled that RapidShare wasn't liable for distribution since it doesn't make files publicly available, and therefore would not have to filter user uploads. P10 will undoubtedly continue to push ahead with its legal attack, however, and a trial is the next logical step after a failed injunction request.