I'm not looking at "pure" capitalism as much as the principal. The principal that makes capitalism great (as far as production goes) is that it harnesses human selfishness and turns it into productivity. The underlying principal is that a person is rewarded based on how much "need" there is for that person's product. This benefits society by driving producers to focus on the most important "needs" of society and letting other, less “necessary” products fall by the wayside.

Protecting intellectual property enables this concept to be carried beyond physical production and promote the innovations and ideas that society "needs" the most. While perhaps not "pure" capitalism, this is very consistent with the goals of capitalism.

And my point was that the converse is also true. To not protect IP is to work against the idea of capitalism: it says that intellectual ideas will not be reward on the basis of how much society "needs" them.

There is nothing great about capitalism in and of itself: it is only good as long as it serves society. When I said that the US was based on capitalism I was probably wrong. More likely the idea was that those who give the nation things that the nation “needs” should be rewarded the most, and I mislabeled that concept as capitalism.