NTP argues that they are not a patent troll, because for a few years in the 1990s they attempted to build a product for which neither the market nor technology existed. Apparently they never tried to make that product happen once the technology did come around, nor did they try to build any other product. One wonders what, precisely, they have been up to all these years.
Besides the direct extortion that NTP just extracted, they're going to cost the industry a lot more in the future. The NTP-RIM case caused RIM to become much more proactive in acquiring their own patents, which are going to come back and haunt the industry when RIM blows up.