>>54226634The simple explanation is that companies can request to take down your fan works. Most companies don't, because most room temperature and above IQs understand that it's literally free advertising.
This is the non-commercial "license" granted to you.
Though, if you're like
>>54227013 and are selling your Pokeporn, then you'll invite TPC to come slap you down. Notice however, in his C&D, that they explicitly only target websites where he was making money from. (Draw our stuff, advertise it for free, but don't you dare make money off of it.)
All these armchair lawyers talking about fair use and quoting sections of copyright law they don't understand, fail to understand that most precedent for Fair Use involved cases of works that weren't explicitly protected, only implicit (ie: photographs, youtube videos, etc.). You have an intrinsic ownership of things like photographs and the like, but we're not talking about that. We're talking about works derived from protected properties, like characters, etc.
Now, let's see who's right. The furry artist making Pokemon, or Patreon suspending his account due to a C&D from TPC/Nintendo? The answer is the latter. This isn't me corpo-shilling. This is just fact. You can see it from the artist's response.
COULD you fight it? You might be able to, if it were solely non-commercial and private. The latter part is important too, as if you're seen drawing any benefit from use of other's copyrighted works, that is a factor.
The problem is, you don't have the legal training for court procedures, so now you're spending tens of thousands of dollars retaining someone who can.