Hello,

My local shooting range posts schedules for various matches held at the range. The club members that shoot 3-Gun matches have started calling their monthly match "multi-gun" matches for fear of copy right infringements.

When and where are we allowed to use the term(s) 3-Gun, etc.?

Thank you,

Dana

Such short phrases cannot be copyrighted - the law is clear (see this Copyright Office publication):

Under section 102 of the Copyright Act (title 17 of the U. S. Code), copyright protection extends only to “original works of authorship.” The statute states clearly that ideas and concepts cannot be protected by copyright. To be protected by copyright, a work must contain a certain minimum amount of authorship in the form of original literary, musical, pictorial, or graphic expression. Names, titles, and other short phrases do not meet these
requirements.

On the other hand, they COULD be trademarked (see the USPTO website):

A trademark is a word, phrase, symbol or design, or a combination thereof, that identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods of one party from those of others.

However, IMHO it would be hard to defend such a trademark outside of a very specific context. For example, the phrase "3-Gun Nation" or "3GN" could be trademarked (in fact they have been, see links HERE and HERE), but I am very dubious that the generic term "3-Gun" could be so protected... indeed, if you read the 3-Gun Nation TM records, they specifically disclaim any ownership of the generic term "3-Gun".

If you planned to run a 3-Gun Nation-style match, and advertised it as such, but without paying whatever dues are owed to the 3GN organization, you should expect to be on the receiving end of a cease and desist letter or even a lawsuit, but I feel entirely safe using the generic term "3-Gun" to describe my matches.

Bullseye matches were called Three Gun matches long before the current multiple gun matches were started.

3-Gun by itself is not trademarked or copyrighted. Multi-Gun is the same as 3-gun most of the time. USPSA calls it Multi-Gun. Multi-Gun is less constraining of a term. 3-Gun leads one to believe all 3 guns will be used at every match, where as multi-gun could be only 2 of the 3. +90% of the time they are the same. It's a matter of preference.

I've seen a lot of local matches where the shotgun component is optional (for pistol) to be called multigun, whereas true 3gun uses all 3 in some combination during matches. I don't think it's a copyright issue.