[kovidgoyal]

1) calibre has always set the author of downloaded news to calibre. There was an unintended loophole earlier that recipe authors could use to get around this, that has now been closed.

2) Many ebook formats do not support metadata beyond title and author, and the code is designed to work with them as well. That is not going to change.

3) Setting the author to calibre is not a means to claim authorship of the content. To imply that it is, is silly. I doubt anyone suffers under the illusion that calibre claims to produce the content downloaded by the fetch news system. Authorship information as well as copyright notices at the bottom of articles are preserved by the download process. Setting the metadata author field is simply a way of signalling that the ebook file has been created by calibre. A way that actually works across multiple ebook formats.