To provide an image processing apparatus that can prevent an illegal copy protect function for a contents signal such as video from being illegally released.

After an encoder 11 encodes a contents signal from a DVD reproduction section 2, a copy protect circuit 12 applies copy protect processing to the encoded signal and outputs the result as a contents signal S104. The copy protect circuit 12 is controlled with control data S103a from a CPU 103 through a 12C-IF circuit 110. In this case, verification data S103b from the CPU 103 are written in a register in the 12C-IF circuit 110 and then read, and the CPU 103 verifies the correctness of a destination of the control data S103a.