Sure, but they ignore the law. Had that with GTA 4, which didn't run fully because the integrated Microsoft-Always-Online-DRM didn't work. Got the "no refund" answer despite having a 8 year old account (at that time) and a not so small, albeit not massively large, library, and without ever having requested a refund before. I'm still angry about that and minimized my purchases there.

Edit: This also means, to the original comment, that Steam does not necessarily make it especially easy to evade SecuROM Hell or other DRM methods, as games on Steam can still have their own protection schemes. It only makes it easier insofar as those are normally marked and games have with Steam only another, better option. Maybe that was meant.

The trouble with laws like that is that they are only worth anything if you have the means to enforce your legal rights under them. If Steam -- or any other supplier or on-line service you use -- is based in one jurisdiction and you're based in another, the cost of actually taking them to court to force compliance could easily be prohibitive.

I'm a little surprised that they haven't been dinged by the card companies yet if reports of whole accounts being blocked based on one chargeback are true. Even Valve are just another retailer to the likes of Visa and Mastercard, and the card services tend to take a very hostile view of merchants who try to evade their obligations under the card service policies if something comes to their attention.

I'm also surprised there haven't been more legal cases considering the implications of SaaS, on-line media library services, software that requires phone-home activation/DRM, and the like. There are obvious ways that such systems/services could provide unfair leverage against consumers in the event of any dispute, and as you mentioned it seems very likely that they would fall foul of the law here in Europe, or at least in several national jurisdictions within Europe. The US tends to give businesses a lot more slack to play with on such matters, though.