I was told the comments from Matt Cutts about paid links are referring to dynamic type links which rotate as the page is refreshed. That all static hardcoded links on a page are equal. So if you pay somebody to link to your page from their and they actually hardcode your url in their page then your page will still get a boost in Page Rank from their site. Is this true? If not then why are people still paying big dollars for links on high Page Rank sites?
Cutts remarks applied to static links. Basically there are two kinds of paid links, those that Google can detect as paid links and those that it can't. The safest course is to purchase links direct from a site owner and to make sure that they are placed in a semantically valid context. - Michael
If you want an example of this kind of "valid" linking, check out the ads on the ebaumsworld.com main page. You can buy a link which "ebaum" then includes into a blog-style post.