EU court upholds fine against Valve for geo-blocking

You can't buy Postal Redux in Germany at all for example, even if you buy a legit key and try to activate it on Steam.

AFAIK this is not required by law, blocking happens either by Valve or the publisher. The requirements are very high (banned must not be sold, indexed requires a actual age verification, both must not be publicly advertised) but "ownership" is not illegal & activation should not be equivalent to sale.

What you have found there is the tape tax. Differs from country to country, but the big one (as usual) is the USA who in 1992 implemented a tape tax after music producers complained that people pirate copied their material so they wanted a compensation on sold blank tape. So in a somewhat genius idea to not make this one way the US government agreed to add a tap tax to blank media but then also made it legal for people to make private copies of music (since they had payed for it with the "tax"). This is also when they started to label records with "explicit lyrics" in the US, a genius idea by the recording industry where they said that they accepted to add this label (driven by Tipper Gore:s [aka Al Gore:s wife] war on music) if they could get the tape tax accepted, fooling the politicians that didn't know or understand that the record industry wanted that label since it would sell more records.

This "tax" doesn't give you the right to make a public performance, only for you to listen to yourself (or friends in a close group and in private). Hence the text you quoted.

Here in Sweden the music producers managed to keep this tax going to modern media so they get a cut of external HDD:s, cell phones and SD cards. Which is complete nonsense since basically no one does pirate copying anymore after Spotify.

I see...I think. As I mentioned before, I don't listen to much music

It's pretty crazy that they can collect royalties on private performances...

But aren't cover bands explicitly permitted under copyright law? I'm guessing this is a separate issue from compulsory licenses. I don't know anything about this other than that though.

Cover bands are a special case indeed with a complex set of rules, I think this page have the best information: https://www.coverbandconfidential.com/blog/cover-song-royalties

In short royalties from covers have to be payed to the copyright holders but the musicians performing the cover can get payed for their work. This is not a special law in copyright though but instead something that record labels and musicians have created to allow this to happen (so not entirely sure that it will cover 100% of all music since it is most likely an opt in or opt out).

Here in Sweden the music producers managed to keep this tax going to modern media so they get a cut of external HDD:s, cell phones and SD cards.

Similar in Germany: https://www.zpue.de/produkte-tarife.html

It seems the eu parliament is finally taking the first steps toward erasing the hypocrisy of the no geolocking "unless your business is more equal than the others". We will see how it goes. Those are powerful lobbies to antagonize.