Patent ID: 7412526

Claim:
An information processing apparatus comprising: accepting means for accepting an access request from a terminal over a network; first acquiring means for acquiring character-designating information unique to said terminal, which designates a character not to be sold to other users and which is received over said network; second acquiring means for acquiring character data constituting said character designated by the character-designating information acquired by said first acquiring means; and transmitting means for transmitting to said terminal over said network said character data acquired by said second acquiring means, for transmitting license information to said terminal granting a right to use said character data, and for transmitting to other terminals other character data when said other terminals request said other character data; wherein said license information is transmitted by said terminal to said other terminals on the network for enabling use of the character data of said terminal as identification data to uniquely identify said terminal to the other terminals on the network, based on a visual recognition of the character data, and wherein the character data is used for identifying said terminal in a plurality of different application programs on each of said other terminals.