Sadly, the definition of "distribution" is so vague that many lawyers won't allow you to "distribute" your code to a box you don't own outright, in an effort to reduce their liability.

I've been in a few companies where this was a problem, since we were working in part for the government, which required us to run our code in nodes which were owned by a separate contractor. The lawyers interpreted that as distribution, and we had to replace the GPL'd portions of code we were using.