In normal case the don't care a [censored] about that and big companies won't bring you to court for that. If they are really insulted by a fan project they write a letter and give you the chance to stop it / switch it offline and you will get in no trouble if you do so.


For my game Starbattle I used sprites from Namco VS Capcom and nobody knows / cares, I remade Final Fantasy VIII's minigame Chocobo World and even applied to work for sqauresoft once and mentioned it as a reference and nobody cared.

Where you really have to be careful is when you mess with "unknown little people", they try to get your last gold coin for the slightest copyright isult.

Big companies don't, it would draind too much of their good name if it was brought to the news.