Your dismissal seems to elide the word questionable. Back in the dark ages of computing, AT&T had a patent on the concept of "backing store" for windows, that

Your dismissal seems to elide the word questionable. Back in the dark ages of computing, AT&T had a patent on the concept of "backing store" for windows, that is, the notion that if you had a GUI with two overlapping windows, you could save the state of the window underneath the other one rather than having to redraw the entire window when the top window moves or is closed. This is an extremely questionable patent; AT&T didn't even invent this -- Lisp machines did that, too, but they didn't try to patent it because it's blindingly obvious. AT&T should never have been granted this patent, and their engineers had to know it. I would argue that "patent troll," although the term didn't exist back then, absolutely applies here, regardless of whether AT&T happened to be shipping their own system that used a backing store. Maybe your personal definition of "patent troll" requires the troll to be an NPE, but an awful lot of people would consider Wikipedia's definition to be more on point than yours: "a patent troll is a person or company that attempts to enforce patent rights against accused infringers far beyond the patent's actual value or contribution to the prior art."