Hello guys. [s]It's me, Francis.[/s]
So recently I've been trying to order some stuff online and met a horrible frustration when I couldn't buy 100% of chosen shirts on Warner Bros. Shop.
The messege about international Orders says this:

"We apologize to our international fans, but this item cannot be shipped outside the U.S. due to legal agreements."

At first I've spotted this on all of the Mortal Kombat shirts and I thought "Hey, maybe it's just a MK thing". Then I browsed Batman, Green Arrow, Gotham and Deathstroke merch and I found the same messege on all of the stuff in those categories. At that point I wanted to kill somebody. Also in moment like that, thought about wishing to pirate a shirt comes up.

Unfortunately, I am not a lawer or a WB employee, so I have no idea what "Legal agreement" are they talking about.
But, they sell their games and movies on international digital platforms.
So, then I decided to look at the DVDs and other media. Guess what....

"We apologize to our international fans, but Blu-ray discs, DVDs, CDs, video games, and digital media products cannot be shipped outside the U.S. due to legal agreements."

Jesus H. Christ, what legal agreements? You are Warner Bros., surely you can at least launch an international storefront or a sparate online shops in bigger countries.

I can't understand, please explain this to me! Am I just silly? Because right now it seems like The Wild Hunt simply doesn't want WB to sell their stuff and they comply.

I know, i know that I just whinig on some unrelated forum and I won't change anything by that. Maybe you guys can set me straight.

Probably different agents have the "rights" to sell franchised stuff in different territories.

+1 because of your avatar, it's from the GoTY 2015.

The legal ownership of intellectual property for movies and TV shows as well as other stuff is often owned by many individuals and companies combined, most often breaking up the distribution rights into different areas of the world, so no one company has unified global distribution rights for the trademarks and copyrighted works, but rather they have rights only within a particular region. Why this is the way it is is often because the amount of money put into such productions is enormous and companies/individuals around the world invest in the franchise/product for a given region.

So Warner Brothers probably has the legal rights to distribute the products within North America and/or some other regions but not within other regions because some other company has been sold the rights to create and distribute products using the intellectual property in another region. As such, they can only legally distribute the products they make in the region they legally own the rights to do so either because they only bought the rights to do it within that region in the case of another party's property that they have licensed, or if it is something they created themselves and sold the rights to another company in a different region then they have entered into a contract with that company to let the other company deal with distribution etc. in the other region.

This is just a generic explanation of how regional licensing agreements work however, only Warner Brothers and their lawyers know the details of what specific contracts they have for a given piece of intellectual property. This is how things work across the entire entertainment industry however for most movies, TV Shows and various other media/content. There are some things that have one company owning global distribution rights for the entire property but that is not generally the norm especially for newer content. So where such a legal contract over distribution rights exists between companies all owning a share of a given intellectual property, they must restrict their business to the region in which they are legally and contractually obligated to do so.

This is also the same reason why sometimes when you go on Youtube to watch a music video, movie trailer or some other content - you get that annoying as hell message saying "Error: This content is not available in your location." - because the company/individual that uploaded it does not have legal rights to distribute that content in your country either because they sold the rights to someone else for your country (if it is content they own), or they never licensed the rights to distribute the content in your country if it is content they've licensed from someone else.

As to why a company would license content only for a single region and not for the entire world, well that's simple to understand. A North American company understands the North American market, how to market to North Americans and has experience in the area, but they may not have a clue how to market to a different culture on the other side of the world and might fail miserably trying to handle selling a product to the whole planet. So instead of trying to market a product to a region of customers outside of their field of expertise, they license the rights to some other company in the given region that does have experience marketing to people in that region. They don't have to deal with complex taxation issues, all of the laws of 200 different countries that'd require 10000 lawyers etc.

That's a general idea of "why" this stuff works the way it does anyway.