Can name="author" register as a link?

[RiceMedia]

Hi all,

We're seeing a very strange result in Google Webmaster tools.  In "Links to your site", there is a site which we had nothing to do with (i.e. we didn't design or build it) showing over 1600 links to our site!

I've checked the site several times now, and the only reference to us is in the rel="author" tag.  Clearly the agency that did their design / SEO have nicked our meta, forgetting to delete or change the author tag!!

There are literally no other references to us on this site, there hasn't every been (to our knowledge, at least) and so I'm very puzzled as to why Google thinks there are 1600+ links pointing to us.

The only thing I can think of is that Google will recognise name="author" content as a link... seems strange, though.  Plus the content="" only contains our company name, not our URL.

Can anybody shed any light on this for me?

Thanks guys!