Patent 7986784 was granted and assigned to Murata Machinery on July, 2011 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
An image processing apparatus prevents reproduction and display of an image file in a viewer of a client PC, etc., by encrypting “fileType” and “version” contained in an Image File Header (IFH), which is file format information, and “tagCount”, “sig_tag0 to 2”, “type0 to 2”, “pointer0 to 2”, and “size0 to 2”, which are file structure information, of small amounts of data, without encrypting image data (data0, data1, data2) themselves each having a large amount of data in the image file of a Tagged Image File Format (TIFF format).