Sega's Dreamcast to this day remains one of the most beloved consoles among hardcore gamers. Its untimely death back in 2001 when Sega decided to leave the hardware business and become an agnostic third-party software publisher has left many wondering if a time would ever come that a new Sega console might turn into a reality.

While the chances of that happening are still quite remote, gamers across the Internet have spotted a recently updated trademark for the Dreamcast (as first pointed to by Trademork). Although Sega's old Dreamcast trademark is still available, the new one (filed in August of this year) describes "home video game machines; player-operated electronic controllers for electronic video game machines; video game interactive controller, namely, hand held pads, and floor pads or mats; joysticks for video games; computer cursor control devices, namely, computer mouse; flash memory cards; video game software, computer game programs."

While some hopeful gamers have taken this to mean that a "Dreamcast 2" is in the planning stages, a more likely scenario is that Sega is looking to protect is trademark, possibly before making its games available on digital distribution services like Xbox Live Arcade or PlayStation Network. Emulation of Dreamcast games has been going on for years now, and tweaking some of the classics for a digital download service is probably not a very challenging task for the publisher.

GameDaily BIZ has pinged Sega for the official word. We'll let you know what we hear.

[UPDATE] Sega of America PR Director Charlie Scibetta is currently looking into the trademark issue and why it was updated. In the meantime he told us that Sega "has no plans to get back into the console business," adding, "We're very happy being a platform agnostic company and have moved up the ranks the past three years from #11, to #9, and now stand at #6 in terms of our market share by units among third-party publishers. We like our current strategy and have no plans to change in the middle of this outstanding growth."