On Mac OS, the system clipboard containing item copied from Finder throws exception MalformedURLException exception for application/x-java-url;class=java.net.URL flavor. Test case: import java.awt.*; import java.awt.datatransfer.*; public class PlainText { public static void main(String [] args) { try { Clipboard board = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getSystemClipboard(); System.out.println(board.getData(new DataFlavor("application/x-java-url;class=java.net.URL"))); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } } Mac Os X pasteboard returns a property list that consists of one URL, but our code supposes to get pure URL.