In a move sure to delight English teachers, librarians, and most of the nation of Italy, Electronic Arts has filed a new trademark application for Dante's Inferno. Although it's already been well-established that EA's Visceral Games was bringing the classic pre-Renaissance poem to current-gen consoles, this new trademark offers some insight into other avenues the mega-developer has set its sights on.

Specifically, the registration names:

"Paper goods and printed matter, namely, comic books; books containing screenplays or scripts of movies, shows or games; trading cards; posters; novels; graphic novels; series of fiction books; comic magazines; books for role-playing, namely role playing game equipment in the nature of game book manuals; art books in the field of computer games; coffee table books in the field of computer games; books in the field of computer games; magazines in the field of computer games"

Yes ladies and gentlemen, EA has trademarked for print publication a poem that was written in the early 14th century, has been made into no less than three feature length films, and is quite simply one of the true classics. Granted, this application probably only applies to the specific IP characters that EA is creating for the game, but still.

This has the potential to spell messy litigation for any author, comic book artist, or table-top game publisher who thought that works of literature over 500 years old were okay to adopt (technically, American copyright laws last 70 years after creation of an IP). Not that a court could legitimately rule that EA's trademark holds up, but I don't know how many companies or writers could last against EA's legal team.

[Via superannuation]