IANAL, but in patent law, novel means there is no single prior patent covering all aspects of the newly claimed patent; non-obvious means it’s not possible to a

IANAL, but in patent law, novel means there is no single prior patent covering all aspects of the newly claimed patent; non-obvious means it’s not possible to arrive at the claimed invention by combining a few prior patents. So, if there are patents for a horse-drawn cart (with two wheels), and for carriages (with four wheels), the idea of a horse-drawn carriage with four wheels is novel, but obvious. I’m not claiming it works as intended, but the idea behind that is to prevent a combinatorial explosion of patents (“oxen-drawn cart with a bench to sit on”, “horse-drawn carriage with a cover against the sun”, “oxen-drawn carriage with a bench to sit on and a cover against rain and sun”, etc) So, it’s not about being obvious to laymen (that’s hard to decide upon, anyways, as many inventions are trivial once you know of their existence)