As far as I can tell, he's borrowing the mathematics sentiment, where "the proof is trivial" doesn't necessarily mean you'll find it easy - it just means that t

As far as I can tell, he's borrowing the mathematics sentiment, where "the proof is trivial" doesn't necessarily mean you'll find it easy - it just means that the interesting aspects of the problem have been dealt with and what's left is a simpler or more general case. That said... I've never encountered "novel IP" as the actual standard for 'trivial' in mathematics or CS. It would take a very strong source to convince me that's a formal or most-common-use meaning. (The Wiki page on 'trivial (mathematics)' certainly doesn't offer that meaning.)