In the typical entrepreneur sense, you are selling/renting something that the other people want or need without any coercion whatsoever.
I bet the people being sued didn't want or need to pay lawyers and settlements, short of being forced by the system.
I'm disagreeing with the definition of "value" used around here - for normal companies, not patent trolls - and to show my disapproval with this notion I insist that the word value be applied here as well.
And when I said system, I meant the law forcing the companies to pay, not the troll using the law as a tool to create profit.
We could enter murky territory on whether other forced forms of income (taxes or fines, for example) provide value, they are forced but on the other hands they are supposedly used to common benefit, instead of private profit.