That's what Google does when they set up a project that accepts contributions. Google Inc. is the author; see http://code.google.com/p/leveldb/source/browse/trunk/AUTHORS

The initial version written by the authors of MapReduce and BigTable

The idea behind this approach is to simplify the maintenance of the copyright line and to encourage collective ownership of the code. I'm told that some open-source projects have conflicts about who's name appears in which files, but I've not experienced that first-hand.