The thought is that if the invention is commercially successful, that invention couldn't have been so obvious to begin with. Otherwise various suppliers throughout the world would have stepped ahead of the inventor to claim the available rewards. It is a bit like the old saying an economist will tell you that you will never find an unclaimed $20 bill lying in the street. Why? Because if such a $20 bill were actually lying unclaimed in the street, someone would have already taken it.
There are a lot of built-in assumptions which come along with the posture that "commercial success" means that the invention must therefore not have been obvious. First, the commercial success of the product might not be primarily attributable to the product itself, but to any number of other factors including advertising/marketing, social trends, quality control, price, warranties, or other features present in the product that are not part of the claimed invention. Second, you also have to assume that such commercial success was foreseeable. That is, that other competitors knew they could make a fortune if they could just figure out how to develop this product, and they just couldn't. But if a product's commercial success was not foreseeable, the reason why competitors didn't choose to develop it may have much more to do with that then with any difficulties of actually creating the invention.
So while "commercial success" is one objective element which may be used to prove non-obviousness, there is ample room in most cases to debate its relevance.
There are a lot of built-in assumptions which come along with the posture that "commercial success" means that the invention must therefore not have been obvious. First, the commercial success of the product might not be primarily attributable to the product itself, but to any number of other factors including advertising/marketing, social trends, quality control, price, warranties, or other features present in the product that are not part of the claimed invention. Second, you also have to assume that such commercial success was foreseeable. That is, that other competitors knew they could make a fortune if they could just figure out how to develop this product, and they just couldn't. But if a product's commercial success was not foreseeable, the reason why competitors didn't choose to develop it may have much more to do with that then with any difficulties of actually creating the invention.
So while "commercial success" is one objective element which may be used to prove non-obviousness, there is ample room in most cases to debate its relevance.
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