Patent ID: 7847958

Claim:
An image forming apparatus, comprising an image reading section for reading an image, formed on an original document, so as to acquire image data; and an image forming section for forming an image on a sheet based on the image data, said apparatus controlling, when a storage device is added to the original document, the image forming section based on information stored in the storage device, said image forming apparatus, further comprising: storage device determination means for determining whether or not the storage device is added to the original document, the storage device being removable from the original document independent of any image data acquired or to be acquired from the original document; added information determination means for determining whether or not the image data, read by the image reading section, contains added information indicating that the storage device is added to the original document; relevance determination means for determining, by going through relevance information stored in a plurality of storage devices from one to the next, whether or not all the relevance information is relevant to each other, when the storage device determination means determines that the storage devices are added to the original document; and control means for controlling the image forming section not to carry out image forming based on the image data of the original document, when (i) the added information determination means determines that the added information is contained in the image data and (ii) the storage device determination means determines that the storage device is not added to the original document, or when (i) a plurality of storage devices are added to the original document, (ii) each of the storage devices stores relevance information indicative of a relevance to another one of the storage devices, (iii) the added information determination means determines that the added information is contained in the image data, (iv) the storage device determination means determines that the plurality of storage devices are added to the original document, and (v) the relevance determination means determines that all the relevance information is not relevant to each other; and wherein said image on a sheet does not contain a storage device and said image forming section embeds copy prohibition information on said image on a sheet, so as to prevent said image on a sheet being used as an original document.