Sorry for not answering this sooner... I've been a bit side-tracked...hehe
As for my pickups... believe it or not, they are the stock pickups that came with my Ibanez RG7420... I used to have the Universe (UV777), and to be totally honest, it had great tone, and was good for soloing, but for really heavy crunching, it really lacked the punch.. in fact I got a really muddy sound from it... so I was never 100% happy with the sound of it. The feel was unbelievable, and I will probably never play another guitar like that one... but if I had it any longer I would have eventually changed the pickups on it.
As for your questions:
1) Internet Piracy is somewhat of a double-edged sword when it comes to music. It definitely hurts bands who are big in the market as well as the smaller ones, however, smaller known bands would never get any sort of attention if it were not for some of the people downloading their music off of the internet. Not every band has the luxury of having a multi-million dollar corporation pushing their music for them. However, where this also hurts is when a small band has ALL of their songs taken and they never get to sell as many CDs because of it. If there were a way to have a happy medium where there was a way that only a select number of songs were allowed to be uploaded to the net giving people a chance to hear what a band sounds like, and then have CD prices come down so that buying a new CD doesn't cost a weeks worth of gas...lol then maybe there would be less piracy out there... of course that could only happen in a perfect world.
2) Honestly, no... I don't think they should be persecuted. Just as long as they don't take the music and try to re-sale it themselves to make money off of the artist.
3) In all honesty... I don't think anyone will ever be able to stop internet piracy. The net is too big, and where there's a will, there's a way. People will never stop sharing music.
~D