Comment 3 for bug 189898

This is the correct behavior: gedit shouldn't copy the selected text in the clipboard because (if you don't use some special applications such as glipper) this will overwrite the previous copied data. This can be very unconfortable for most of the users. For example, if you copy an image from GIMP, delete it, and select some text in gedit (not perforce for mistake) you will lose the image.

For this reason I mark this bug Won't Fix, but please feel free to reopen the bug or ask questions about, I'd happy to try to solve your problem.