Chris Marlowe with the Hollywood Reporter reports on an AT&T Labs study that reveals that most pirated movies on the Internet are being pirated by people within the movie industry — that is, by insiders. A similar Reuters article appears on CNN.com.

This is a big surprise? Insiders have access to high-quality content, and they have friends on the outside who want it. Why wouldn’t they leak it?

We’ve seen such insider problems before. For example, when U2 songs appeared on the Internet before they were pressed onto CDs, it was someone inside the recording studio who leaked them out. Back in 1998, when a copy of Windows 98 was dropped onto my computer by software pirates 2 weeks before the official release date, the source turned out to be a software piracy ring operating out of Intel.

The recording industry likes to blame consumers, but they really have themselves to blame.