COLUMBUS, Ohio - At a recent showing of "Big Fish," several moviegoers at a local theater held up camera-equipped cell phones and took snapshots of the screen. Doing the same with a video camera will soon be a crime.

Yet the October study by AT&T Labs questioned the impact of camera-toting movie pirates. Researchers created a list of the 312 most popular movies released between January 2002 and June 2003.

Their conclusion: 77 percent of the films came from insider sources, either motion picture companies or theater employees taping from the projection booth.

Stevenson of the MPAA says the researchers used flawed data. The movie industry says its internal analysis last year found that 92 percent of recently released movies found on the Internet came from camcorders.

Tuesday's audit by the Los Angeles Police Commission's inspector general concluded that supervisors do not regularly review the "digital in-car video system" (DICVS) footage.

The audit comes as the recording of police activity—either by the public or by police video cameras—has become a national phenomenon in the wake of an 18-year-old unarmed teenager being shot and killed by a Ferguson, Missouri, police officer in August.