Control method for controlling an application program

A control method of an application program in an information processing apparatus that operates an operating system, and operates a plurality of application programs including first and second application programs on the operating system in parallel, comprising:

• running the first application program in a first memory space;
• running the second application program in a second memory space, which is different from the first memory space;
• recording a set of application programs in which copying data between the application programs is prohibited;
• running a monitoring program, which runs along with the first application program in the first memory space;
• detecting a function call to record the data to a shared memory space;
• accessing a memory space that is capable of being accessed by either of the first and second application programs from the first application program to the operating system;
• indicating by a digital watermark that the data is copied from the first application program;
• running a judgment program on the information processing apparatus to determine that the function call reads data from the shared memory space;
• inhibiting data from being copied such that the data recorded in the shared memory space does not include the digital watermark;
• and
• running a control program on the information processing apparatus to inhibit and modify the function call;
• detecting a function to read data from the shared memory space, from the second application program to the operating system such that copying data is inhibited;
• recording identification information for identifying the first application program into the shared memory space, which is a memory space accessible by both the monitoring program and the control program, in response to the detection of a call of the function to record data into the shared memory space by the first application program;
• and
• judging that copying the data is inhibited such that a set of the application programs to be identified by the identification information acquired from the control memory space and the second application program is matched with a set of the application programs recorded in a recording section.