> Thus, the statement ‘An invention shall be taken to involve an inventive step if it is not obvious to a person skilled in the art, having regard to any matter

> Thus, the statement ‘An invention shall be taken to involve an inventive step if it is not obvious to a person skilled in the art, having regard to any matter which forms part of the state of the art […]’ (s 3 Patents Act 1977) is logically equivalent to ‘An invention shall be taken to involve an inventive step if the inventor’s powers of imagination are above those of a person skilled in the art’. Um, no? First of all, if A is "this invention is not obvious", and B is "the inventor has higher-than-average powers of imagination", then the first sentence is A -> B, and the second sentence is B -> A. That is, if A is not obvious, it may be that the inventor is more imaginative; but just because the inventor is imaginative doesn't mean that every idea she comes up with is non-obvious. Kind of stopped reading after that. In any case, just because "this invention is not obvious" doesn't mean it can only be seen by people with higher-than-average powers of imagination; you can hit upon things either by thinking hard about the problem, or by just trying thousands of things until you hit upon one. However it's done, the idea is that 1) someone has invested a lot of effort to find a new technique 2) this technique is easy to copy once you've been told about it. We want to encourage people to do this work and then share it with others, so we reward them with a patent. Whether the effort was purely mental, or a mix of mental and experimental, or pure brute-force experimental doesn't really matter.