This sound like the nvdia driver

So, then just mark the module as "GPL" in the data read by the kernel and then in the accompanying text state clearly that the module is not licensed GPL and is only marked as such for interoperability. Courts have already ruled that playing games like this with IP law basically makes your IP impossible to enforce. For example, the original Nintendo Gameboy would refuse to run a game which did not display the Nintendo trademark when it loaded, so a 3rd party just put the Nintendo trademark on their game without permission, Nintendo sued them, and the courts threw it out on the basis that Nintendo was the one who forced them to do things that way.

I don't get the argument that if A imports symbols from B then A is a derived work of B. I can see that A+B is a derived work of A, but B alone isn't unless you buy the whole APIs-are-copyrightable nonsense. Symbols are just cross-references - how is referencing something a copyright violation? That is right up there with the whole deep-linking debate.

Sure, I'd love to live in a world where it wasn't legal to run non-free software on Linux, but that desire doesn't really make it legally enforceable.