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There's no evidence that I'm aware of, but as the areas come with the distribution then IMO it's probably fair enough to assume they can be used with the distribution - at least unless you have reason to believe otherwise.
If you don't assume that, where do you draw the line? Unless you write all the code and areas yourself, there's no way to be truly certain that it doesn't contain anything which infringes someone else's copyright.
It was a representative of the FSF who said that if the Diku team wished to create a new licence (eg GPL), they'd need permission from each contributor. If you purchased the Diku team's copyright and wished to change the licence, it strikes me that the same reasoning would apply.
But in this case we know that the contributors contributed towards Diku with the understanding that their work would be used under the Diku licence (they're basically people who were using the early version/s of Diku, already under the Diku licence, and submitted code to be added to later versions). To the best of my knowledge, the area files were contributed in much the same way.
This is why I believe it's okay to use the areas with Diku distributions - because the evidence would suggest that such was the intent of the authors (although without explicit permission I could certainly see them demanding removal of their work). It's when you want to use the areas outside of Diku distributions that it gets more difficult.
I also agree with Valg's points about modifying the areas, and agree that the best solution is to write your own areas from scratch.
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