Agreed, he needs to evolve a strategy that is based on 2 things:

a) Claiming authorship of his original content

b) Devising ways to prevent content theft

At the same time, if his site was inflicted with a Panda-penalty, he will make a lot of gains using authorship.

Astrid,

David is right; you will put almost the entire backlinks' profile of .net at risk. The quantum of the risk and the subsequent results are factors that nobody would be able to predict with perfection.

That is correct.

It wont work without a proper headshot.

The author profile is just a way to authenticate yourself to Google. If you have the ability to set profiles for other people of your company, you should be fine.

There is not a simple solution for your particular case. Your site ranks below an exact match domain and another site that is haaretz.com. It would be very difficult to rank above chriscornell.com as it is an exact match domain.

Haaretz.com has a domain authority of 91, while your site's domain authority is 40. Until you tell the search engines that the content posted on haaretz.com is originally yours, it would seem difficult for your site to outrank haaretz.com

As a first step, I will setup an author profile using g+. That should give you more visits since your author profile information should include headshot as well.

Besides this, I don't thin there are many options that are available off the table. You will need to work on improving your site's overall authority.

Do you mind sharing your site's URL? One of the easiest ways for you to rank higher than those sites would be to setup author profiles and claim yourself as the author of the original content. It would be a way to tell Google that it's your content.

It may take a few weeks time for things to settle down.