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Area files are almost always copyrighted to their author. As far as I'm aware, including them in your mud would not make it a derivative, but it might classify it as a "compilation" (rather like a book of short stories) - nothing to do with Diku, but still something which included work copyrighted to others. The area files are totally independant from the mud, however, so I don't see any reason why you couldn't simply remove them if you later ran into legal concerns.
I'm pretty sure that file formats aren't protected by copyright. The Diku team have also stated the same view in the past, so I think you're fairly safe in that regard.
However you may still run into issues when using other peoples areas without permission. In the case of Diku, I think it's fairly safe to assume that the area authors gave permission for their work to be used with the distribution and its derivatives.
In the case of other muds, I'm not so sure. I could see some builders not being very happy about their work being used in a commercial mud, for example, unless they were getting a cut.
The difficulty is that there's no separate licence for the areas themselves. You could try and track down the authors, but I don't know how successful you'd be.
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