IMHO it's useful to know about the upstream authors - especially for fonts designers when sometimes the metadata/readme files inside the font aren't really descriptive enough - but I'm ready to remove it if needed (a few other packages already use it). I'm curious to know more about why this does not belong there.Because it probably more belongs to debian/copyright.
I see.But IMHO the content of this file is not exposed in the package metadata showed in apt/synaptic whereas reflecting that in the control file gives this piece of information more prominence (even if it is now linked on packages.debian.org).
So I'll drop this optional field if you prefer it this way. -- Nicolas Spalinger http://scripts.sil.org http://pkg-fonts.alioth.debian.org https://launchpad.net/people/fonts