Get Hyped - The Patenting Business Methods for Internet Based Commerce Conference

Tomorrow and Wednesday I will be attending the Patenting Business Methods for Internet Based Commerce Conference (or PBMFIBC Conference for short).  I was invited because last year we engaged an Intellectual Property lawyer about protecting what we believed to be a new innovation in the collection of geographically relevant user review information.  Ultimately we walked away without a patent when the cost started to quickly bypass the estimate we were given by the lawyer (but hey, I do get free tickets to the PBMFIBC).  Since that little experiment I have been pretty down on the place for patents in most web based start-ups.  I am curious if two days listening to presentations from Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and IBM (the folks who sue start-ups??) will change my opinion.